# ide sata vs ahci sata bios settings

## billydv

I am running a p7p55d asus board and there is a choice for your sata config. I am wondering if one is better than the other. I have no interest in hot swapping as this is a desktop system.

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## Anon-E-moose

IDE setting will only see the 1st 4 sata connectors, at least it's that way on most systems.

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## Ant P.

IDE-SATA is an emulation mode meant for installing Windows, as it lacks the proper drivers in its installer. Use AHCI.

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## Goverp

I suspect it doesn't matter.  My Acer motherboard's BIOS offers various modes and I couldn't get the AHCI setting to work reliably.  There's some old documentation of genuine issues using it on this motherboard, so I set it to the non-AHCI mode.  But... dmesg says "pci 0000:00:11.0: set SATA to AHCI mode" and the drives claim to come up in AHCI mode.

My guess is the BIOS code only affects operations during the boot process, and thereafter the Linux kernel bypasses it.

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