Gadgetory

thanks for watching tech wiki click the subscribe button and enable notifications with the bell icon so you won't miss any future videos so you finally decided to address a huge bottleneck in your computer by upgrading to an SSD for your boot drive but when you finally get up and running something seems a little off maybe your file transfers are slower than you expected underwhelming SSD performance could be caused by a somewhat obscure setting in your UEFI BIOS you see most modern hard drives or SSDs can be set to operate in either IDE mode or AHCI mode but what in the heck does that mean well there are multiple ways your system has of talking to drives IDE or parallel ata is the standard that was used for a long time back when we were all using those huge grey ribbon cables to connect hard drives to motherboards drives with the newer smaller SATA or serial ata connectors that most of us use today can also utilize a newer standard called advanced host controller interface or a HCI ahci enables cool features like hot swapping so you don't have to turn off your computer if you want to unplug an external drive from an eSATA port or use that super neato hot swap bay in the top of your case a less obvious but also important advantage is support for native command queuing which affects the way that your drives handle multiple requests who fetch data at one time on hard drives using NC q can mean the drives read and write head doesn't have to move around as much to get a certain piece of information speeding up your access times but how does a HCI also help speed up SSDs well although the benefits of NC q on SSDs are small or negligible for home users many users do report greatly increased performance especially for large file transfer in a HCI mode compared to IDE mode due to HCI just plain being designed with more modern drives in mind so then why would you ever want to use IDE mode can we just get rid of that option well if you're running an older operating system such as Windows XP or earlier there's a good chance that it won't have native HCI support meaning it won't play nicely with your drives if your motherboard is set to HCI mode unless you do some software trickery when you install the OS this might also be the case if you're trying to run software from a bootable USB stick or an optical disk and if you have a boot drive that you've been using an IDE mode but then switch over to a HCI you might get a boot error forcing you to switch back to IDE though fortunately if you're using Windows there's a registry tweak that you can use to fix this more permanently if you're interested we've linked instructions in the video description below of course ahci isn't the end game for drive protocols and the sexy new one nvm Express is starting to gain popularity while you won't be able to use it with garden-variety SATA drives it's being implemented in high-performance PCI Express SSDs and since nvme was designed from the ground up for solid-state storage it can enable speeds several times faster than what you'd get with a HCI on a standard SATA interface so you might want to look into those if you've got some money to burn and milliseconds count when you're trying to frantically open Google Chrome to watch the latest exciting installment of tech quickie speaking of doing things frantically do you find yourself racing around trying to get all of your work done and then collapsing exhausted in your computer chair trying to fight your way through horrible accounting software well if you're a freelancer or a small business owner FreshBooks is the opportunity for you to start saving your time and being more productive because with their cloud accounting software you can be more organized and get paid more quickly create and send professional-looking invoices in less than 30 seconds setup online payments with just a couple of clicks to get paid up to four days faster see when your client has seen your invoice putting an end to the guessing games and best of all try it all for free for 30 days with an unrestricted trial just go to FreshBooks comm slash tech quickie and enter tech quickie in the how did you hear about us section so thanks for watching guys like dislike leave a comment with suggestions for future videos subscribe and don't forget to press the little bell so you get all our notifications and we will see you again in the next tech quickie exciting installments coming at you every few days or so