Enable AHCI to get a boost in your SSD speeds

One thing you may have overlooked with you did your last SSD upgrade on your older PC was to enable AHCI mode.  Basically in your computers BIOS screen you need to make sure that the SATA controller is in AHCI mode.   In the video below I go through an example on how to do this on a older computer that was upgraded with a SSD.  However if you have a newer computer that already came with a SSD, odds are your system is already setup for AHCI mode and you do not have to do anything.

AHCI stands for Advanced Host Controller Interface.  It is a specification defined by Intel that describes the operation of Serial ATA (SATA) host bus adapters.  Some of the advantages of AHCI includes hot-plugging and Native Command Queuing which may improve computer, system, and hard disk responsiveness in multi-tasking environments 

Step 1.
To enable AHCI, you will need to go into your computer's BIOS.  You can do so by rebooting your computer, and hitting either the F2 or DEL key to enter the BIOS depending on your particular computer. 

Step 2.
Once in the BIOS, change the SATA drive setting from either IDE or RAID to AHCI.  Then, save and exit the BIOS.  Your computer will now reboot in SATA AHCI drive mode.

NOTE:  Please make sure to enable the AHCI driver in the registry before you change the SATA mode of the boot drive in the BIOS.  Otherwise, you may receive the following error message below upon Windows restarting. If that happends you will need to undo what you did in the BIOS and put back the SATA drive setting to IDE for example.

         STOP 0x0000007B INACCESSABLE_BOOT_DEVICE

To learn more about enabling the AHCI driver in the Windows registry before you change the SATA mode in the BIOS, see the following Microsoft KB Article 922976.

          Error message occurs after you change the SATA mode of the boot drive  https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/922976