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Solve : SSD on RAID card - IDE mode?? |
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Answer» I have just bought & installed an SSD, (a 128 GB OCZ Vector). Since both the SATA ports on my Shuttle PC were already occupied, I bought a PCI-e SATA card. What I got was an ST Lab A-341 2-channel RAID card. I hung the SSD off one of the ports on the card and use Acronis True Image to clone my existing Windows installation onto it. This worked fine and everything seems to be working well. After the Shuttle BIOS screen, the ST Lab BIOS screen appears, lists the SSD, and then Windows starts up, much quicker than before.* 1. Does the SATA card contain its own disk controller which is AHCI only, and therefore the connection to my SSD is in that mode? Yes, it does have its own controller which can be in any mode, depending what the controller is intended for. Sometimes it can be changed, sometimes not - usually it's done with a key combination just after POST which should be shown on screen, like Ctrl+A. Quote 2. Or does it inherit the IDE mode setting from the PC's own BIOS? Nope, it's entirely separate from the onboard SATA controller. Quote 3. How can I tell? AS SSD will show you the storage driver in use in the top left, for example "iaStor - OK". If you post what it says there, it's possible to tell what driver is being used, and probably what storage mode. Quote 4. If the RAID card BIOS is in pure AHCI mode, (there don't seem to be any settings to alter), maybe I should make the registry alteration again? The registry alteration is basically to stop Windows blue screening, if you're getting into Windows there's no need to change it as it won't make a difference. Quote 5. How much does it matter? AHCI helps a lot on an SSD. The main reason for this is that it enables NCQ - Native Command Queueing. Your benchmark scores seem very low for that drive, I suspect either the driver being used is old, or that the SATA controller isn't great. It is a Silicon Image controller, which generally aren't known for great performance if your system seems nice and snappy running off that controller though, don't sweat it. I think personally I would move a less performance critical drive, like a DVD or HDD, to that controller and let the onboard SATA controller handle the SSD. There's no need to move everything off the SSD, the page file is ideally suited for an SSD in fact. Basically, install Windows, run the Windows Experience Index which will automatically disable Superfetch and scheduled defragmentation on the drive, and you're good to go. If I may say so, though...if you're within the returns period, I would be inclined to return that drive. OCZ is bankrupt and the warranty status on their products is unclear, Toshiba have bought most of their assets but nobody seems to know for sure if they will be honouring warranty claims or not. Quote from: Calum on January 20, 2014, 01:10:21 PM OCZ is bankrupt Yes I read that. I am in the Maplin 28 day period plus it's covered by their 1 year warranty. I may return it and use the credit for a Samsung. Thanks for your help. Samsung or Crucial is the way to go IMO. Can't go wrong with a Samsung 840, whether basic/Pro/Evo. Crucial M500 is decent too, also consider the Plextor drives which use similar controllers to the Crucials, or the Toshiba drives are also really nice and can be a real bargain for the performance they offer. They seem to be reliable, too.I have a Kingston SSDNow V300 Series SV300S37A/120G 2.5" 120GB SATA III Internal Solid State Drive (SSD). if you return unwanted goods to Maplin within 28 days, they levy a 20% charge, whereas they have a 365 day 'no quibble' policy on faulty goods so I might just wait and SEE if it goes down in that period. Ah, I was assuming/hoping you'd bought online, where the distance selling regulations would apply. If you bought it in store, then yes, I would keep it, no point returning it and paying a 20% fee.It was a typical situation for me - Maplin next door to where I work - wife away for a few days - impulse buy - a day off - bit of hardware fun - you get the picture?The other room of our flat is full of the results of similar situations I have a cupboard... I hung the SSD on the Shuttle's motherboard controller and got these figures with Crystalmark: One forum I saw had a person post similar figures and a responder said they weren't too bad for SATA II Sequential Read : 240.969 MB/s Sequential Write : 211.983 MB/s Random Read 512KB : 184.572 MB/s Random Write 512KB : 210.341 MB/s Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 27.425 MB/s [ 6695.5 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 63.914 MB/s [ 15603.9 IOPS] Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 30.119 MB/s [ 7353.2 IOPS] Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 99.696 MB/s [ 24339.8 IOPS] Looks a lot better to me, exactly what you'd expect really on an AMD SATA II controller. The fact of the matter is, Intel SATA III ports will be the fastest overall, with AMD SATA III ports following. Intel SATA II ports next, then AMD SATA II, followed by pretty much any addon controllers apart from the high END ones like LSI. Even though a lot of the addon controllers from Jmicron, Asmedia and Marvell are SATA 3 capable and thus can put up good sequential numbers, the random read and write performance suffers, and that's where the main performance advantage of an SSD is felt. For whatever reason, the AMD AHCI drivers don't seem to be as good as Microsoft's own AHCI driver, so if you're currently running the AMD driver then switching to the MS driver (msahci) might give you a small to moderate speed boost. In the days when the X58 chipset was king, before good integrated SATA III controllers, I had many a discussion with people who told me time and again that I/we were wrong for running the SSD off the Intel ports, because they were only SATA II. When they actually benchmarked the drive on each controller and saw how it felt on each, they inevitably agreed that gaining random I/O performance (and reliability) was worth the tradeoff in headline sequential performance.Late getting to this post after a few days without surfing the web and here. Looked up the utility you mentioned in: Quote Update... SSDready has been running for 2 hours and now it says the SSD life is 5.7 years! The write/read ratio has changed to 0.46. Going to check this out when I get home from work. Here is link in case anyone else comes to this post and wants to check out the utility. http://www.ssdready.com/ In regards to OCZ, I have 3 of their SSD drives and no problems yet. But interesting to find out that they went bankrupt and warranty terms are in limbo. Its too bad seagate didnt buy them up as for seagate has been great with honoring and extending warranty periods on acquisition company products. When it comes to Toshiba, I trust their computer product line, but not so sure about Hard Drives branded by them. Seagate has been great for me, I had a Maxtor 500GB HDD that died right after the 3 year mark of its warranty and it became a paperweight. My youngest brother saw my paperweight the one day and said whats up with that, and I said its dead. He then told me that Seagate bought out Maxtor and extended the warranty to 5 years on Maxtor drives. I contacted Seagate support and registered the Maxtor drive and entered the serial number and they gave me a successful warranty claim RMA notification. Sent it in and they shipped me back a healthy low operating hour 500GB Seagate SATA II drive with the refurb label and a 3 year warranty on the replacement drive. That 3 year warranty is just about up, but that 500GB SATA II HDD is still working without any flaws according to crystaldisk which I run on occasion on systems to look at the S.M.A.R.T data etc to see what the reallocated sector count is etc and its still 0 of 100 threshold. Curious as to what this SSD Ready utility will forcast for life expectancy based on usage for my systems running SSDs. Other than OCZ SSD drives of the Vertex 3and Agility 2 and 3's, I also have 2 Corsair SSD's and no problems with those either so far. Only suggestion I can make in regards to a SSD upgrade is to go with as large of a drive as you can afford that is realistic to your needs, but also as large as possible for a laptop or netbook where you likely wont have the ability for a 2nd storage device to be installed. I bought a Corsair 32GB SSD for $29.99 for my wifes system and while it gives you the SSD performance similar to a larger capacity SSD, its really tight for the Windows 7 installation eating up about 21GB of it without additional software installed. So her system is actually running a SSD and a HDD and the HDD is where programs, personal data, swap space, etc is stored and the SSD is mainly acting more as a READ ONLY boot device where the system is fully booted to desktop in 13.5 SECONDS from POST screen to desktop fully loaded with all services loaded etc, and thats just a Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz E6600 CPU system with 2GB RAM. But even with a better CPU, such as my AMD Athlon II x4 620 2.6Ghz, its booted to desktop and all services loaded complete in 12.6 seconds as stop watched with Windows 7 64-bit and 8GB RAM ... so only .9 seconds difference in time to boot to desktop with all services loaded between the Core 2 Duo E6600 and newer build AMD Athlon II x4 620. But when it comes to games etc, the Core 2 Duo does show its age in comparison to the quadcore.The drive has a 1 year warranty from the retailer, and if it goes wrong in that time I'll try another brand, I guess. I am pretty satisfied with the brisk performance I am getting, and I am not going to waste a lot of time chasing relatively small incremental speed increases. After all, this is intended as a mid-to-late-life refresh for my Shuttle, and I will probably be replacing it in18 months to 2 years, if the Lord sees fit to preserve me that long. |
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