I have tried to research this subject and find various conflicting answers on the internet.
I have an Abit IP35 Pro motherboard with an 82801IR (ICH9R) Southbridge chip set. This give the option for raid 0 or 1 or 5 (I think) subject to the number of drives. I have three SATA devices attached. A Samsung 840 Pro SSD as the primary OS drive and Non Raid member and two 1TB WD Red drives in raid 1 (Mirror) as my data drive
I have just upgraded to windows 8.1 but cannot ascertain from the registry if AHCI mode is loaded for the Samsung SSD. There is no msahci entry in the registry only istorV. Also Samsung Magician is saying that it cannot fully access the SSD as it not properly configured as AHCI. In Device manager the storage controller lists Intel Desktop/Workstaion/Server Express SATA Raid Controller. I have installed the latest driver v10.8.0.1003 released 17/10/2011.
I was lead to believe that when I choose Raid from the Bios option any Non-member disk is addressed by AHCI but this doesn't appear to be the case and therefore the SSD is not working at full potential. If I choose AHCI from the bios then there is no option to configure Raid for my data drives.
Please could someone enlighten me if I am able to have both Raid and the SSD as AHCI addressed?
Fozzie