Today, I finally enabled AHCI such that I can take full advantage of an external port on my Cooler Master CM 690 II case. I had tried enabling it when I first installed the GA-880 motherboard, and my drives would not start up.

Then, for some reason, the next tries saw the machine start, but, it would become hyper-active, the hard drive light staying on permanently. I had all but given up on ever having a hot swappable external drive port .

Today, it didn’t do any of the above., and once Genie Timeline had settled down, the system is strolling along at a nice leisurely pace.  I have no idea why it is working. I did nothing but keep trying every now and again and I don’t remember downloading anything special or AHCI applicable.

Maybe failing memory and health has something to do with not remembering what I did..  Plugging a SATA drive into the port sees it recognised very quickly. Removing the drive is quick but the listing in Computer takes maybe two minutes to recover. I wish that I worked that well.

But hey, it works and that can only be good. It is a great way to back up. All desktop cases should have a similar drive port.