I have a Gigabyte GA-EP31-DS3L motherboard. I have looked at BIOS but cannot find a setting to switch to ACHI mode. No BIOS update available. I have installed a SSD, Crucial M4, which is running in IDE mode but haven't noticed a significant difference compared to the old hard drive. The CPU is a Core™2 Quad Processor Q9550, 4gb DDR2 memory. Wondering if there is anything I can do to get the SSD to work better. Thanks
First of all, make sure it's aligned correctly (just google ssd alignment) I too have an SSD on an old mobo without AHCI, but I don't experience any of the slowdown you allude to. Sure, It's not as fast as a new ACHI mobo and Sata 6gb, but the difference is not really noticeable.
Yup that board uses a old and pony ICH7 southbridge. No AHCI for that. Not sure what problems you will run into, we had a office full of machines that ran on them and they were always a bit "chuggy" with HD's.
You shouldn't notice a difference in speed from AHCI - IDE anyway All I would do is Bench mark it with ATTO HERE You should get about 300MB/s read speed.... if you're close to this its running full speed for SATA 2. Then I would just make sure TRIM is working Open a command prompt and paste this in and hit enter fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify if it comes back with answer = 0 TRIM is working. You would only have to align the SSD partitions if you have cloned the DATA from a hard drive to a SSD or if you are using Windows XP or earlier Windows 7 8 and Vista fresh installs don't need it although Trim wont work with vista or earlier versions. real world speed you should notice that windows open faster and your computer is much more reactive than under a hdd.
Entering - fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify at command prompt gives a reply of 0 which I understand indicated that TRIM is working
No, you won't get 300MB/s as this simply isn't feasible even with a SATA controller with ahci & the latest drivers d.t. overheads & whatnot. Even with something like an 840 Pro, a 3Gb/s controller with ahci should max out at approximately 270/260 in AS-SSD & 280/270 in CDM - reads/writes. Without ahci then you'd expect the reads to be a somewhat lower &, obviously, they're only the sequential speeds... Well, you'd expect a more significant (esp in %age terms) drop in small reads as the queue depth increases... ...so, irl usage, it will be slower - though naturally will still be much quicker than a HDD. Otherwise, whilst it's worth double checking with the fsutil command, if it returns a 0 then this doesn't mean that trim's working at all. All that this means is that the OS is setup to send the trim command - telling you nothing about whether the SSD is actually receiving the command or not. Well, as a couple of examples, you would get the 0 response with either an SSD where the controller was set to raid & with SSDs in R0 prior to intel releasing (at different times) drivers that supported trim in this setup... ...you'd also get it with SSDs in R1 or higher, even though the drivers don't support trim... ...&, similarly, with SSDs on a pcie card or a pcie SSD - where these simply don't support trim. Naturally though, if the OP gets a 1 response then, prior to the stuff below, they should then enter - fsutil behavior set disabledeletenotify 0 - so that at least this part of the chain is set up properly. it's certainly true that ahci isn't needed for trim... ...however it's not "*just* a OS of Windows 7 or above that's needed." Well, you also need a compatible controller & drivers &, naturally, a SSD that supports trim. This means that, since, (ttbomk) the ich7 controller isn't supported by the irst drivers & (categorically) trim's not enabled in the matrix drivers that do support it, it 'may' only be the msachi driver that supports it. Now, even if the msachi driver does support it, whilst it's part of Win7 (& onwards) there can be circumstances where it will instead use the matrix ones on old controllers. So it's worth double checking which are being used in device manager. Otherwise, looking at the mobo, if you're not running any PATA devices then it would be worthwhile altering the "on-chip sata mode" setting in the bios to "enhanced" (it's in the "integrated peripherals" bit). Now there's a lack of clarity as to exactly what this does - well, it certainly adds features to how the controller works with SATA drives but exactly what is unclear. Well, whilst it won't add ahci support, it's certainly worth a try though. &, once you've gone through all of that, running something like trimcheck should (hopefully) verify things one way or another.
Thanks for your input. I ran trimcheck and its reports that trim is working. My BIOS does not have an option to change the on-chip sata mode to enhanced hence the SSD is running in IDE mode
That's positive... Well, you've got a proper answer, & with trim working then the M4 will be far more resilient/less prone to slowing down than without it. However, re the option for enhanced, that's not what it says on page 39 of the mobo manual... ...& i've checked the manuals for the 3 different revisions of your board & it gives the same option in all 3... ...& there's nothing in the bios update notes to suggest that the option was added or removed subsequently. Maybe Gigabyte just make stuff random up in their documentation??? Well i've not used one of their boards in maybe 12 years or more so i've no idea if they've been prone to doing so... (i'm not trying to bad mouth them by claiming that they do - i just clearly can't dispute the OP as they're confidently stating that there isn't the option...)
Thanks, I will double check the BIOS settings this evening when I am back at home. Thanks for the link to the manual. It could be that I missed this or looked in the wrong place. If I do indeed find the enhanced option will this have an impact on my Windows installation.? I know setting ACHI after Windows installation with out changing registry will cause windows not to boot. Also realized that this computer has a PATA DVD drive how will this be affected by using the enhanced option if I can find it?
Very quickly, as it's gone 9.30am & still haven't slept. i think i may have misread things earlier as, from a quick google search, it now seems that the enhanced mode doesn't disable PATA... ...or rather it certainly shouldn't within Win7. Right, whilst i can find nothing that states exactly what it adds, the other options (other than "enhanced") appear to be for legacy OSes that didn't natively support ide. [NB the one thing it certainly does do is to separate out the sata & ide interfaces, rather than the ide functions being routed through the sata registers... ...but what else it does isn't clear.] Obviously, my initial thoughts were around ensuring that, if possible, trim was operating... ...which it clearly is... ...so the reason for trying out the enhanced mode now is simply as it 'may' improve performance. Naturally, the only way to tell is to run the same benchmark (b/m) both before & after altering the setting - obviously with a decent amount of free space on the SSD (so the 1st b/m, doesn't hamper the 2nd) & the same background processes running & whatnot. Yeah, it's just not something that's come across particularly - someone running a SSD on a board with such old settings - so it's trying to look at what might logically improve things without any significant level of info or comparison... ...& whilst i was a reasonably early adopter with SSDs, first buying some in 2009, i was using an X48 board with a ich9r controller - so your board's settings predate my SSD usage. Otherwise, the ich7 controller simply doesn't support achi (the ich7r did) so there's no setting that you could alter in this regard that could stop the OS from working - as it would if you didn't apply the reg hack if you did have a controller that supported achi & changed it from ide post the OS install... ...well, unless you disabled the ports or over/underclocked the cpu to the point where it didn't boot or something - but things like that would be corrected by returning the settings to what they were.
Had another look at the BIOS and found the enhanced mode setting. Changed this but it hasn't made things any faster. I forgot to check if the PATA DVD drive is still working. I'll do this this this evening. Any other suggestions??
is it that it's not perceptibly faster or quantifiably faster? - ie is it simply that you were expecting more from a SSD generally & this hasn't given it or that you're actually getting very slow speeds when you test them...? ...&, in either case, how slow are they? Well, there's obviously limitations to both only having a 3Gb/s controller & that the controller doesn't have ahci capability that simply can't be gotten over no matter what... ...&, separately, because the controller's not compatible with the irst drivers, which, in general (there's the occasional odd shonky one), are quicker than the Microsoft ones, then there's no options there unless MS happen to update their driver in such a way that there's a difference... ...so unless there's something badly wrong with the quantifiable speeds, given these limitations, that needs problem solving then the remaining options are now very limited, if not non-existent.
Thanks again for your reply. The difference in speed in negligible compared with the old hard drive the SSD replaced. I have not run read and write speed tests so its more what I was expecting. I may as well live with the hard drive and sell the SSD
