[Solved] IDE vs AHCI

I've got the following installed:
Gigabyte Z68A-D3H motherboard
Corsair Force GT SSD (main drive)
WD Caviar Black 1.5TB (media drive)
EVGA Superclocked Nvidia GeForce GTX 560
Kingston HyperX DDR3 4 x 4GB (16GB total) RAM 1.65v

When my computer boots up, I see it calling the drives "IDE", which I understand is the old protocol? I'm fighting the learning curve here and this machine is my first home build. Now, I guess there's an option to put the computer in AHCI mode on the motherboard. Is this beneficial at all? My system is pretty stable so far and boot time is under 30 seconds. So, just looking for some advice.

Mahalo!

It is hugely benefitial to SSDs if you want to get anything close to SATA3 speeds. However, enabeling it will force you to reformat the drive, so be sure to backup your files before doing it. It will bring that boot time from 30sec down to 10-15sec , granted even my wife's core2duo with SSD is booting at 15sec (after post beep), and her board is far too old to support AHCI.

Thanks, Outlander. I used that procedure you linked to edit my registry then I went and enabled AHCI. I saw the "installation" when I logged in, so I"m assuming that went alright. The fact that the machine booted back up twice after that leads me to believe I didn't break anything. I started a clock from the time I pushed my power button and it took 50 seconds to get to where Windows 7 was up and the mouse didn't have the "wait" cursor next to it, so not sure of total success, but things appear to be stable.

Not really sure what else to do - any suggestions on how to test it out?

Edit: Also, my SSD and HDD internal drives now show up as ejectable drives on the "safely remove hardware" tool. Is that normal?

You have probably figured this out by now. AHCI makes the drives hot swappable.