Quote Originally Posted by Hawthy View Post
Hmmm...The wife is already agog that I have three hard drives. Not sure how she is going to look at an additional two. Maybe look heavenwards to the cloud?

Tannin, you know about this tech stuff...the installation guide told me to go into the BIOS to change IDE mode to AHCI mode. It was set at RAID mode so I changed it to AHCI. I rebooted and received a Windows error "Inaccessible Boot Device". I just switched it back to RAID and everything is peachy. I think that my processor doesn't support AHCI. I checked to see if I could upgrade the BIOS but HP do not provide any support for Windows 10 for computers sold prior to 2013. Am I missing anything major by using RAID rather than AHCI? A split second or two doesn't worry me.
AHCI support isn't a processor based setup, it's a driver config issue.

You have to follow a predetermined set of steps to use AHCI when going from IDE mode.

That is, you need to delve into the registry, change the data that tells the OS that it's supposed to use AHCI BEFORE!!! you change it in the BIOS on the hardware side.
Once you have affected the registry change, as it doesn't change until you reboot, at this point you're still operating.

Then you reboot the computer, but you need to delve into the BIOS before bootup and then change the BIOS to use AHCI mode from IDE or RAID mode.
Then reboot again, and you should be good to go.

Easiest way to switch from IDE to AHCI mode is if you do a fresh reinstall of the OS.
So before you start installing windows freshly, you'd want to change the BIOS to AHCI mode then start installing.

I remember seeing a 50% speed increase on my old motherboard in switching from IDE mode to AHCI mode on my previous PC. But it used spinning disks.

Nowadays the latest and greatest hard drive controller system is called NVMe. It's supposed to be better optimised for SSDs, whereas AHCI is optimised for spinning disks.

There may possibly be a BIOS update for your laptop for it to make use of NVMe, but in my experience HP are usually less likely to do so.
Their update support(for new features) is usually lacking.