Hi there, I'm planning to install Win 7 but confused while selecting the appropriate AHCI driver for my system. It must be installed at the beginning of the OS setup and I don't know if there is a way to enable it afterwards.

I think there are 2 different AMD Win7 drivers that enable AHCI for SB7xx chipsets. One is 'amdsata.inf' that comes with '10-3_win7_32-64_ahci' package and the other one is 'ahcix86s.inf' which is under the '10-3_win7_32-64_raid' package. AMDSATA.inf seems newer, dated 10/07/2009, v1.2.0.164 whereas AHCIx86s.inf is dated 07/01/2009, v3.1.1540.151 and AMDSATA.inf file has some power management options in it. Do both of them enable NCQ and Hot-Swapping? Which one gives more performance?

Also there can be a generic driver that is bundled with Win 7. I'm using an older version of the ahcix86s.inf under WinXP right now and I haven't had any problems with a Seagate SATA2 320GB drive yet. Which one do you recommend for a single SATAII HDD system and AMD SB700 chipset under Win7 32bit? Here is my system details,

Biostar A740G M2+ mATX mobo
WD Caviar Black 500GB
Athlon64 X2 5400+ (Brisbane)
Mushkin 2x1GB DDR2-800 4-4-4-12
Sapphire Radeon HD 4850 512MB GDDR3
Win7 Home Prem. 32bit

Thanks for your support...
Berkay OZDENOGLU

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Biostar A740G M2+ v6.x mATX mobo
Athlon64 X2 5400+ @2.8GHz. (Brisbane)
Mushkin 2x1GB DDR2-800 4-4-4-12
Sapphire Radeon HD4850 512MB GDDR3
WD Caviar Black 500GB
Samsung T190 19" 1440x900 WXGA LCD
Win 7 Prem. 32Bit

AHCI drivers will be included with your cat install for your GPU.

Windows 7 will install base AHCI at time of install unless it is raid drivers and they are located on your motherboards download page.

I my self find the ones bundled with official Cat 10.3 work best for me.

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AMD phenom II 1090T @ 4.23 Ghz custom water cooled
Asrock 890 FX deluxe 3 mother board
4 GB DDR 3 1600 @ 1688 Mhz 7 7 7 24 T1 2688 Mhz NB
2x 1 TB WD Sata III 64 mb cache HDD,s raid 0
2x 5870 HD @ 1015/1300 Asus reference
Dual OS win 7 x64 ultimate & win 7 x32 Ultimate (bench os)

Hmm, OK. You mean, when you install Cat 10.3 after the OS setup, it'll replace the generic AHCI driver with the new one. That's a good feature because you couldn't change the AHCI driver in WinXP. Also, I had a look at my mobo's drivers page but that didn't include a SATA driver for Win7. There were XP and Vista drivers though. Features page says it supports SATA RAID 0, 1, 10 but Win7 isn't in the 'OS support' list.

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Biostar A740G M2+ v6.x mATX mobo
Athlon64 X2 5400+ @2.8GHz. (Brisbane)
Mushkin 2x1GB DDR2-800 4-4-4-12
Sapphire Radeon HD4850 512MB GDDR3
WD Caviar Black 500GB
Samsung T190 19" 1440x900 WXGA LCD
Win 7 Prem. 32Bit

So just install windows 7 in AHCI mode and it will install generic drivers. Then install the cat 10.3 official and it will replace the AHCI with official AMD/ATI drivers.

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AMD phenom II 1090T @ 4.23 Ghz custom water cooled
Asrock 890 FX deluxe 3 mother board
4 GB DDR 3 1600 @ 1688 Mhz 7 7 7 24 T1 2688 Mhz NB
2x 1 TB WD Sata III 64 mb cache HDD,s raid 0
2x 5870 HD @ 1015/1300 Asus reference
Dual OS win 7 x64 ultimate & win 7 x32 Ultimate (bench os)

Even though right now the AHCI driver provided by AMD is just for Windows Vista, not officially for Windows 7. But Windows 7 shares the common driver base as Windows Vista, so you could deploy this AHCI driver manually. The default AHCI driver coming with Windows 7 could not release the performance of SB700 SATA AHCI components, in other words, the burst speed could not reach 150MB/s(SATAI 1.5Gb/s). But after updating with ATI/AMD 10.4 AHCI Vista driver, it could reach about 160MB/s or above(depending on the HDD you use) for bursting. I think it is worth trying...BUT RISK ON YOUR OWN!

Edited: 05/26/2010 at 03:29 AM by wenchangwu

Also if you have an SSD which you would like to receive the TRIM command, you're best off sticking with the msahci driver.