Hey guys, I'm finally upgrading my computer to Sandybrige!! I bought an: MSI P67A-GD53 B3 Core i5 2500k and some mem, keeping everything else the same for now but will upgrade my GFX card at Xmas MY QUESTION I have a Vertex 2 Sandforce SSD and with my current board which is an old XFX 780i I had to change the Drive controller to Microsoft as opposed to nVidia to enable TRIM support. When I install my P67 board do I have to do this or does the board natively support TRIM? Obviously I will be installing my SSD in the 6gbs SATA port but this should support TRIM right? Cheers in advance!!
It's now more the operating system than the board for TRIM. All 1155 motherboards allow TRIM. However you'll need Windows 7 to actually use TRIM
I thought you had to change a setting bios for this. I have same motherboard and changed a setting from IDE to (?correct abbreviation) )ACHI. It then gave me more options for SATA hot plugs which I have no idea what it does.
thanks guys! So it was just my old nVidia chipset which is why I had to do this. That great! One more question, should I perform a "secure erase" and update the firmware of my SSD before installing Win7 on it again?
Be SURE at 100% that your SATA controller in your BIOS is set to AHCI, BEFORE installing Windows 7, else no TRIM (and also no eSATA, no hot swapable and no NCQ, as well).
Is there anyway to test the health of an SSD drive yet? Like SMART (which is inaccurate with SSDs i believe?(
thanks for the advice guys! Yea I heard a secure erase makes the SSD like it was just out of the factory so if my SSD has degraded at all then it should go back to its original performance? is that right? Anyway I'll do that, update firmware and resintall windows then. Thanks for the Bios advice too Goodbytes! I will be doing this next week on my hols, and hopefully get some time to overclock as well. Hopefully my Titan Fenrir will be able to handle the heat from at least a 4.5ghz i5 May have to get some Penetrators just to help airflow though.
I set this in my BIOS (MSI p67a gd53) before a Windows 7 install. However, it popped up some options about enabling hotplugs? There was an option for each channel and I have no idea what this is about? Any advice?
Normally, setting the SATA controller to AHCI mode, enables hotplug for all SATA port of that SATA controller. Hotplug feature allows you remove or insert a drive while the system is turned on. Exactly how USB works. You plug a USB memory stick in your computer, it detected it, no crashing, everything is nice and neat, your OS detects it, and your ready to put files in, your done, you can pull it out. Now, in the case of the SATA controller, you obviously don't want to pull out the drive that has Windows on it while it it... I mean it WILL work, I tried it, if the system is idle at 100%, you will not get a BSOD, and the system will STILL work, you can even open the start menu just fine. But obviously, anything you open, will not work as the HDD is missing. Inserting back the main HDD, will take a couple of minutes for the HDD to spin up, and allow Windows to sync up as it is a main drive (normally there is no delay for other drives), and everything you ran will open in order. The reason why Windows doesn't BSOD the moment you pull out the HDD, is because Windows Vista and 7, puts everything on the RAM (hence why it consumed a lot more memory than XP). Now, as much cool and useless it sounds.. it's because it's not designed for this. It is designed for: -> Computer cases that allows ejecting a hard drive, like your second or third, or more.. -> But more useful and used, eSATA support. eSATA is external SATA. It's really nothing more than a SATA port, put outside of your computer. The shape of the port is different than SATA, because it is designed to hold the wire better. The idea of eSATA is to allow you to attach external HDD's that are in an enclosure, like USB HDD's, but instead of using USB, which is slower than SATA, and very CPU intensive (even USB 3.0), and in the case of USB 2.0, only uni-direction (can only read or write, not both at the same time), you get to use the same performance as your internal SATA HDD. This is excellent if you use a external HDD for backup's (as it can do it much faster), or for an external HDD that you use as an extender of your internal HDD (put your video's, music, pictures, etc..) Now, I never saw or even heard of what you are seeing in your BIOS screen. I think it's a silly idea, the person that took this decision.. either you support full AHCI or you don't support it all. I don't know why you have port selection, and I don't know if, that if you set one of the SATA port, you also completely disable AHCI support. I don't know if Windows will screw up. I would just leave hotplug turned on. and only turn off if it causes a problem, like if you have performance degradation for some odd reason, or the computer takes forever to boot.
Cheers for the info. Think I will be on and off these forums quite a bit (The last computer I built was a barebones shuttle PC with an AMD (K6 2?) in it I think. I remember thinking that MMX was the business back then
