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I am compiling to an SSD connected through SATA using IDE emulation on Windows 7.

Unfortunately, I forgot to enable AHCI when I installed, and though there are ways of performing surgery on Windows to get it to use AHCI after the fact, they do not apply to my specific situation. I would need to wipe and reinstall the OS which is a pain.

Do any of the advantages of AHCI apply to compilation such that they could improve the compile and link time performance of my C++ applications? I am not doing much else in the background (I've disabled indexing of the SSD).

quack quixote
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user4881
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2 Answers2

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It's worth enabling AHCI, but there is no need to reinstall. Here's how you should do:

  • If you're running XP, then install the ACHI driver from the motherboard vendor. For Windows 7 you shouldn't need to install any drivers.

  • Add the following 3 lines to an empty text file:

    Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
    [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\msahci]
    "Start"=dword:00000000

  • Save the file, in a file with the extension .reg and execute it.

  • Reboot and then enable AHCI in the bios.

It works on XP, Vista and Windows 7, but if anything fails, just disable ACHI in the bios and reboot.

zneo
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I highly doubt it is worth reinstalling to enable AHCI on your SSD in order to improve compile performance under Visual Studio.

John Zwinck
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  • I am inclined to agree. I can't remember ATM where I saw it, but there were some benchmarks, and it didn't seem to make that much difference according to the benchmarks. – Robert Harvey Dec 05 '09 at 21:29