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I installed a Samsung 840 SSD in a Windows 7 machine. It seems to be working fine, but I'm not seeing the expected performance. The AS SSD benchmark gives 76 for read and 138 for write. At the upper left of the benchmark it says "pciide - BAD" and "31K - BAD".

I'm assuming the "pciide BAD" means the motherboard (Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4) is configured as IDE emulation and needs to change to native SATA. I don't know what the "31K" refers to. The bios settings look like this: enter image description here

I saw this article that indicates that changing the SATA mode of the boot drive can cause problems (Blue Screen): Error message occurs after you change the SATA mode of the boot drive

What is the correct procedure to change the SATA Mode without causing a system failure? Apply the registry change from the MSFT article above first, then reboot and change the SATA mode? Will the SATA mode change in the BIOS affect other drives?

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    You need to change your BIOS for ACHI, but before that you need to make a change to your registry... the exact change that needs to be made will depend on your version of Windows....so if you google something like "turning ACHI on after installing Windows X" where x = your version of Windows, you should be able to find directions. I don't think the SATA mode will effect the other drives as long as you are not booting from them, your optical drives should function under either.. if you are booting from the other hard drives, make the appropriate changes to them as well.
    – TheXed
    Nov 6, 2013 at 15:28

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Apply registry modification, then reboot, enter BIOS, change to AHCI from IDE, then startup, allow windows to install its drivers, restart when it prompts, then install the latest Intel/other controller drivers. Windows update might help in this last step.

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  • This worked - the system successfully booted after changing the drives to AHCI. However, the ST31500541AS drive is not visible in the BIOS or Windows. If I unplug it from the motherboard and connect it to a USB-SATA adapter, it works fine. Is the drive incompatible with AHCI, or is something else going on?
    – tim11g
    Nov 7, 2013 at 17:28
  • When the system boots the BIOS displays a new Intel AHCI bios page now where the drives are listed. But not the ST31500541AS.
    – tim11g
    Nov 7, 2013 at 17:29
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    AS SSD Benchmark is now 258 for Read and 137 for Write.
    – tim11g
    Nov 8, 2013 at 1:35
  • No the drive is definitely compatible with AHCI. So is the motherboard. There should be 2 options to select for AHCI. One for the Intel ICH9R controller, and the other so-called "GIGABYTE SATA2 chip", which I suspect to be a JMicron JMB36x device, because it uses the same driver. You have probably not enabled the other one. In any case, can you post screenshots of the relevant sections of your BIOS?
    – Milind R
    Nov 8, 2013 at 8:29

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