How to Change the AHCI Drivers of an SSD or HDD in Windows

Change the AHCI Drivers of an SSD or HDD

On many occasions, users neglect the drivers of our PC and when we realize how outdated they are usually we tend to proceed with the update. The problem is that the remedy can be worse than the disease, since with the continuous versions of Windows they can give errors. Therefore, today we will learn to change the drivers of our SSD or HDD for the AHCI and its controller, so that we go from a proprietary one to a standard one.

It must have happened to you: updating a driver and having problems on your PC. They may not be detected in the moment, but they end up showing up, and it is difficult to understand what is happening. Errors with AHCI drivers are almost without a doubt the worst, because in most cases they prevent the OS from starting, so in these cases we have to go from the proprietary driver of our on-board controller to the standard, but how to do it?

From proprietary AHCI to standard in easy steps

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The first thing we must do is without a doubt make sure that our SSD or HDD is installed in the correct controller. This is somewhat visual on the motherboard, mainly because there are boards that have two different controllers to increase the number of SATAs .

Normally, if your motherboard does not have more than 6 SATAs, it means that it only uses one controller and therefore we will only have a specific driver for it. Knowing this, we can already determine in Windows which is the driver to change, because otherwise we would have to change as many drivers as there are controllers and it is not plan if they do not fail.

The first step is to open the device manager , either from the Windows control panel or from the OS start button, where we will see a structure similar to this.

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Once inside the device manager we have to go in the tree towards “ATA / ATAPI IDE controller” after which we will open it as shown in the following image.

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In our case we are talking about a Z370 motherboard, therefore the controller belongs to Intel and its 300 series chipset, as you can see. The next step is to change the Intel driver itself to a standard Microsoft driver.

To do this we click with the mouse and its right button on the controller and select “update controller” , after which we will get the following window in the middle of our screen:

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From the two available options we will choose the second: “Examine my PC for drivers” , where we will then obtain a new window.

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Here we will again choose the second option available: “Choose from a list of drivers available on the computer”.

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The correct option to select will already appear here, as Microsoft always enables the standard AHCI driver to maximize compatibility. Of course we select it and give it to next, after which it will be installed and replaced by Intel (in this case).

After this, the problems with the driver on our HDD or SSD should have been resolved and Windows should work normally and with maximum performance, at least on paper. It is not recommended to use this substitution technique for key drivers, that is, this does not apply to any PC driver, since a standard driver has to be broad in scope.