IDE vs AHCI with XP32

I just reinstalled XP, as my old install was getting flakey - I have two installs now, on different disks. I have an Asus P5Q SE and Seagate barracuda disks, the only way I could get Windows to recognise the disk was by telling the BIOS to make it look like an IDE disk. My old windows install worked fine on AHCI mode.

After a little reading I discovered that if you want to run in AHCI mode you have to supply the XP install a driver disk before installing windows. There is a way to add that driver later, but it's a little tricky. Also there's debate about whether AHCI is worthwhile or not.

Does anyone have an opinion on whether I should go to the trouble of trying to get AHCI working on my new XP install?

I'm running my Vista instal in IDE mode because I stuffed up when I first did the build.

In theory AHCI is better, it allows how swaping of SATA drives through eSATA and is supposed to speed HDD access.

I did a bit of reasurch about the differences though and it seems that the performance difference isn't really that much, so small that most people won't notice it.

Hot swapping would be nice, but I could never get that going on my current windows install - though I did change motherboards after the XP install so that could've caused problems. I think NCQ only works under AHCI, and all my drives support NCQ, but still what little i've read also suggests performance is very similar.

I guess i'll stick with IDE, just because it sounds easier. Now's the time to change though, all i've done is install XP and all the updates, which took an entire evening. I have a ghost image now though, so hopefully I don't have to do it again.

AHCI can introduce headaches with XP especially if you ever need to repair the drive. It's generally the recommendation to disable it if you can when using XP. Vista isn't much better either but at least it has AHCI support natively.

As noted most of the features aren't needed by the majority of people.

However, AHCI does introduce some nice features if your HD supports them like advance power saving modes, NCQ (Native Command Queueing) and hot swapping. There other advantages but those the three main features. Another feature is increased bandwidth but that's highly variable as AHCI on some controllers and/or HDs can actually throttle your bandwidth!

AHCI being enabled with opticial drives can lead to interesting faults as well.

OK i'll stay with IDE then, thanks

I found a couple of weeks ago that XP SP1 won't even install on a laptop with a SATA drive even when set to IDE mode (XP bluescreened during setup)
Found that anything newer than XP SP2 is supposed to have drivers for SATA. What I ended up doing is making a XP install CD with SP3 slipstreamed onto it. Install then worked fine.

My CD is XP SP0, it can't even see hard drives if you're in AHCI mode, they require IDE mode, as AHCI wasn't around when XP was released.