AHCI: yes or no ?

Hello there, I am currently using XP SP3 with AHCI not installed (yet). I was about to try to activate it (and therefore install the drivers) but I read here and there that it can cause problems by regularly taking some CPU. That would be only a fraction of a second, and a few times each hour... but can be a problem for audio. "AHCI offers hot plugging and native command queuing, but also seems to have a major drawback with DAW under some circumstances (Chipset or driver issue) like audio stuttering for approx. 1 sec every 20-30 minutes ! no such problem with IDE or RAID modes. " (quoted from here: ) What do you think/what are your experiences ? I would like to activate AHCI simply because I have a cool external SATA harddrive that I can insert in a special bay, and it is supposed to be "hot pluggable". But it is not for now as I am in "IDE" and not "AHCI" mode. Thanks by advance !

Plus, telling from what I've heard everywhere, the performance advantage of AHCI over IDE is next to non-existant. Not worth the hassle.

And Window does access the controller from time to time, causing glitches in audio, video or whatever real time process might be running at the time. Don't know why, and it does depend on the hardware, but if I didn't need AHCI for external drives support (my external doesn't work in IDE mode) I'd turn the darn thing off.

Thanks for all your answers !! So I'll stay as I am for now. The only thing is, if I lose this "hot plug" thing with my fancy little external/internal harddrive. I only use it as a backup so the idea was to plug it in, backup, plug it out.

Hello, Disabling AHCI should have nothing at all to do with USB connectivity or Firewire - as I do not have any problems with either an external HD, flash drive or the 01x - which is Firewire. Hope this helps?