HP Z800 Workstation - No AHCI Controller? RAID Only?

Hi!

New to this forum - What a find! A fantastic resource, a huge amount of effort from Fernando it seems, massive kudos and thanks for that.

No doubt, you will be able to answer my question.

I have a high performance HP Z800 workstation, which i have just upgraded with a Samsung 850 Pro.

I cannot find a specific setting in the BIOS to set AHCI mode, only RAID or IDE. There is an AHCI controller in the BIOS POST, but after looking on the forums some people are saying that is only for optical devices and does not work for HDD/SSDs? Is that true?

I have managed to upgrade to the "Intel Chipset SATA RAID Controller" driver version 14.5.0.1081 using the drivers from this site if that helps to identify the controller more specifically?

Is there a way through software to enable AHCI for the SSD? Could the OEM have disabled AHCI through their own fw?

I know that changing from IDE to AHCI will not give a massive performance boost as its only a 3 gig port, but it would make me happier

Any advice much appreciated!

@ MikhailCompo:
Welcome at Win-RAID Forum!

>This< document confirms, that your workstation does not support the AHCI protocol.

Not really, because you are running the Intel SATA Controller in RAID mode.
According to my knowledge your system has an Intel ICH10R Southbridge and your currently installed Intel RAID driver is far away from being a good choice for an Intel ICH10R SATA RAID Controller.

No.

Yes. Systems with an Intel ICH10R Southbridge natively do support AHCI.

If you are not able to set the on-board Intel SATA Controller to "AHCI", I recommend to stick with the RAID mode.
Regarding the "best" Intel RAID driver and RAID ROM version I recommend to have a look into the start post of >this< thread.

Regards
Dieter (alias Fernando)