IDE (or) AHCI on Intel Atom D510 build with 80GB SATA 1 HDD 5400rpm

[DaveLembke]

Noticed after replacing 2032 battery on a board and reconfiguring the bios settings that the SATA controller was set to IDE. When looking at the choices its AHCI or IDE with IDE being the default config. I left it at IDE but was wondering that other than what I see here about the 2 http://www.diffen.com/difference/AHCI_vs_IDE   are there any pros or cons to leaving it alone at IDE. The hard drive is an older laptop hard drive that is 1.5 SATA and not 3.0 speed and only 5400rpm. I cant imagine there being that much of a performance gain in switching to AHCI. The motherboard runs an Intel Atom D510. I pretty much repurposed a laptop hard drive for this ITX build and knowing that the Intel Atom was going to be not the best of performance anyways that a slow older hard drive paired with it would probably be just fine.

Performance wise, the build is reliable and works well for what it does. Just figured I'd check here to see if its worth it at all to switch to AHCI vs leaving it at IDE default for the SATA controller setting. To me it seems that maybe if I had an SSD that this AHCI would be beneficial, but still the Atom CPU is a bottleneck in the performance of a SSD as well so idk. 

[Salmon Trout]

There is a small hard drive performance hit when you use IDE mode due to Native Command Queuing being disabled. I think it is desirable to have NCQ on server type scenarios and with an SSD. I would leave it alone. I doubt you would notice any difference with that hardware.

[DaveLembke]

Thanks for the info.

[Calum]

I'll echo Salmon here, with HDDs there's usually very little to be gained from AHCI mode over IDE - the exception being features such as hot plugging which IDE mode doesn't support.  It's straightforward enough to change to AHCI mode without reinstalling if you want to - https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/987378-how-to-switch-from-ide-to-ahci-without-repairingreinstalling-windows/ - but I'm not sure I'd make the effort if it was my PC.  IDE used to be the default mode for compatibility with ancient OSes, thankfully that's changed in recent years.

[DaveLembke]

Thanks for additional info... yeah i didnt want to switch to try it out and bork the data, so i left it alone at default.

[Geek-9pm]

Thanks for additional info... yeah i didnt want to switch to try it out and bork the data, so i left it alone at default.

Good choice.
Use AHCI if you go to a SSD.
Advanced Host Controller Interface gives faster transfer of data if the device can do it. RAID and SSD are candidates.

Boot issues

Some operating systems, notably Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8, do not configure themselves to load the AHCI driver upon boot if the SATA-drive controller was not in AHCI mode at the time of installation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Host_Controller_Interface