Falcon 128GB / Intel 975XBX2 (ICH7)

[markd89]

Hi,

I'm thinking about buying one of these drives for my desktop Core Duo PC which uses an ICH7 chipset motherboard. My plan would be to clone my existing hard disk onto the SSD using Acronis True Image, then use the old hard disk for swap file only.

Can I expect everything to run smoothly/full speed with this combination?

Thanks much,

Mark

P.S. I am using Windows XP 32 bit

[markd89]

Also, do I need to have AHCI enabled to get full performance.

Thanks
Mark

[G.SKILL]

yes, you need to enable AHCI
since it's ICH7, it would be not as fast as we tested on ICH9/10
and the performance would be better in Windows Vista/7 than in Windows XP
thanks


G.S

[markd89]

Thanks for your response.

How much faster is AHCI than IDE mode in real world usage?

(I don't want to reinstall XP, but I know there are hacks to enable AHCI without doing so. If the difference is 10% I won't bother. Going from a mechanical disk to SSD would still make a huge performance difference.)

Thanks
Mark

(P.S. I want to use GSKILL only because I have been very happy with the quality of my RAM. I went through several replacements from another vendor without getting reliability. My GSKILL RAM worked right away and kept working :-)