Here is a small tip for improving the performance on your Macbook Pro if it has the Nvidia MCP79 controller.

By default Windows 7 will pick the IDE driver instead of the SATA driver. While your drives will perform just fine, the performance might be a bit lower compared to what you get under Mac OS X.

Since I’ve upgraded my 13″ MacBook Pro (MBP5,5 – 2009) HDD to an Intel SSD (x-25M G2) last year, I noticed that I wasn’t getting the performance comparable to the benchmarks that can be found online.

Here are a few steps that I found on insanelymac.com (credits to Zr40) that will solve this issue. Please note that this will only work for Macbook Pros with the Nvidia MCP79 chipset (some forum users report BSOD when trying this hack on other chipsets):

1. In Device Manager, find the Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller.
2. Choose ‘Update Driver Software’, ‘browse …’, ‘let me pick …’.
3. Uncheck ‘Show compatible hardware’.
4. Choose ‘Standard AHCI 1.0 Serial ATA Controller’ in the manufacturer list, and the same for model (should be the only model)