[ale] do you HAVE to have AHCI to use a 4K sector drive?

[Ron Frazier (ALE)]

Hi all,

I'm looking at upgrading one of my hard drives.  As I wrote about here 
in January, all new drives are made with 4KB sector sizes rather than 
512 bytes.  Based on my reading, among other things I said before, I 
stated that you must have AHCI to properly use a 4K (or advanced format) 
drive.  That wasn't a big problem at the time since I think my laptop 
was already set that way.  However, my desktop mb defaults to IDE, and 
I've been reading horror stories about breaking Windows by switching the 
mode after installation.  Not only that, if I turn AHCI on in the only 
place that the bios gives me a chance to, almost all my sata ports 
vanish from the post screen.  It seems that they're being presented as 
IDE, which seems backwards to me.  I don't know if that has any real 
effect or if it's just eye candy.  I've been reading web pages for 2 
days trying to find out if you HAVE to have AHCI mode in order to use a 
4K sector drive.  I cannot make heads or tails of it.

So, the million dollar (figurative money only) question is, assuming I 
follow the other steps outlined in my prior posts to allign the 
partitions, update the drivers, and make sure the os can read the actual 
sector size as well as the logical sector size, can I run my new hdd 
without enabling ACHI and thus leaving the mb in IDE mode.

The motherboard is an msi 890fxa-gd70 with amd chip set and cpu.  The 
hdd I'm installing is a wd 1tb black conventional sata spinning drive.  
I dual boot between Windows 7 and Mint 13.

What I think I've been reading is that AHCI enables native command 
queueing (NCQ) and hot swapping.  It apparently is in debate whether 
there is a significant real world advantage, versus what synthetic 
benchmarks say.  I don't need hot swapping.  If I should ever buy an 
SSD, NCQ may make a bigger difference, although I'm not sure.  I'm under 
the impression that TRIM can work for an SSD even without AHCI, but I'm 
not sure about that either.

If anyone can shed some light on this for me, I'd greatly appreciate 
it.  I'd like to just install the new hdd, taking the other preparatory 
measures, but leaving the bios in IDE mode.

Thanks in advance for any help.  Hopefully this post makes any sense at 
all at this time of night.

Sincerely,

Ron


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Ron Frazier
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linuxdude AT techstarship.com
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