Ouch. Turn off the second option - otherwise you risk data corruption if the power goes off suddenly or the system spontaneously reboots.

Trust me, I know because I had that option enabled before, figuring I was safe because of my APC UPS. Then my 5970 graphics card started going bad and spontaneously rebooting my PC... nearly lost the contents of my Outlook data file because of it (thank God for backups!).

The second option is intended for systems where the drive has some kind of capacitor or battery that enables it to commit pending data in the cache in case of a power failure.

 it stands for Advanced Host Configuration Interface, the main reasons to use this are that

1 it allows drives to queue mange the requests (ie data request from track 20, 70, 30, 120, 50 would actually execute 20,30,50,70,120 saving stepping time (ssd not applicable as ALL data is electronically accessed no moving parts)

2 it allows hotswapping.

there are other reasons to use also, but these two are the main ones.

ide mode dates BACK to the days of 20MB ide interface hdds to replace the older MFM & rll controlloer/SEPERATE drive sets from the 80's & very early 90's

harpo

jupp second option should be turned of you can leave it on the hidden partition
the samsung is fast and like you said they have their own controllers so far im happy with it it looks good and seems to be a stable robust build
havent tryd raid 0 yet but as soon as i get my hands on a thunderbold drive i will try it and give feedback the only problem i noticed so far on the samsung is that they seem to slow down on boot time if external drives are connected i guess thats more a windows problem since its loading all the required data and checking the usb drives on startup AHCI takes about 5 seconds to check the ssd im still running rev1 bios and the latest is 7 but i dont like flashing it because of known problems

Anyone care to advise me as to how to enable AHCI, or send me a link to the info? 

OCZ Vertex EX3 in IDE MODE:

The OCZ is connected to a Marvell 91xx SATA 6G controller. I'm running in AHCI mode.

As you can see, in this case, AHCI doesn't seem to help things.

I don't have any specific tips. I just like seeing how different SSD's perform.

AHCI (I think) is set in the BIOS.

I can find it in device manager, but not sure that is what I need to set.

usually it is set in the advanced section of the BIOS, again usually with the MODE for the sata ports(often the choices are ide/ahci/raid), but all windows before vista either expected ide mode OR you had to load drivers to access the hard drive to install the os, so on old hardware might not have been available.

harpo

RND.....check this first BEFORE you do ANYTHING....

Oh, bollocks....stripped the link....hang on.....

 If you're still using IDE mode, read THIS before switching or you risk not being able to boot into Windows afterwards.

There...

I've never been able to tell a performance difference (or even benchmark) between IDE and AHCI.

Thanks for the effort Jafo! I had already read it. Some of these screenshots suggest that I may not see that much difference anyway. 

Brand new mobo in a brand new system I just built. But look as I might, I haven't been able to find it.

I'm not sure Biostar is the best mobo to have bought. If I had bought a better board, I could possibly unlock the 4th core on my triple core cpu.

I bought a mobo/cpu combo.

what biostar is it?