Getting the most performance out of your SSD drive.

I had converted my machine from a magnetic platter drive to a SSD a year ago.  I noticed the performance wasn’t as fast as it should be for certain operations.

My SSD was connected via IDE and I hadn’t enable my controller to support AHCI.  I changed it before, but Windows 7 wouldn’t boot by default.  If you installed the OS originally via an IDE drive you need to enable the AHCI driver first via the registry.

1. Click Start, type regedit in the Start Search box, and then press ENTER.
2. If you receive the User Account Control dialog box, click Continue.
3. Locate and then click one of the following registry subkeys:
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Msahci
   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\IastorV
4. In the pane on the right side, right-click Start in the Name column, and then click Modify.
5. In the Value data box, type 0, and then click OK.
6. On the File menu, click Exit to close Registry Editor.

Once that is complete go into your BIOS and change the SATA operation mode to AHCI.  You will notice a pretty substantial performance increase from using the new driver.

I don’t have a SATA III 6Gbits compatible sata controller, so this is as fast as the performance will get on SATA II 3Gbits/s.