Storage SSD AHCI

Hello,

I have just bought a marvell Sata III Pcie controller card, along with a 128gb Force 3,

I haven't got an ahci enabled motherboard, it's an msi h55-ed55.

The problem is from the marvell bios set up page there is only RAID settings, but the card i'm using only has one internal port and my other HDD's are connected to the motherboard.

What I want to do is set up the SSD in AHCI mode without having to do a raid configuration, but I cant find anyway of doing this.

Have any of you found a way around this, or encoutered a similar problem??

Thanks

 

What controller card you using?

 

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/lyco...1ext-and-1int-2ports-low-profile-pcie-20-host

 

Pretty sure your motherboard does support AHCI.

The H55 chipset supports AHCI, and I don't believe any modern motherboard would not include support for AHCI.

This might help. Although if your running Win7 I think it should support AHCI without having to install any drivers.

 

You can't just turn on ACHI in bios and then boot into windows. Need to run a registry fix from MS then reboot, enable AHCI in bios then boot into windows. Will now be in ACHI mode. Of course if you can't find AHCI in bios because you didn't go to AHCI school then none of this is relevant.

http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9741862

 

Thanks guys,

I'll get on this as soon as I finish work,

 

Isn't that only if there's already an OS installed?

If its a fresh install, it should just be turn on AHCI, then boot and install windows.

I never installed any registry fix when I did it on my system.

 

Well I do have a win 7 boot on another hdd so I can do it that way,

But I couldn't find a option in the bios at all for turning on AHCI, I dont know if it's because of the controller card or what, but it's not there.

I'm using the ssd for win 7 bootdrive if that wasn't clear so I would want to avoid setting up my old hdd to make this work.

 

Looks like the option is on the 'On chip ata devices' menu in bios:

http://www.anandtech.com/Gallery/Album/576#1

 

OK, so i have enabled the AHCI mode on my motherboard but it still shows my SSD which is connected to the controller card as an IDE SSD, I have done the registry fix that feathers suggested also, to no avail.

 

Ah well, enabling AHCI on the mobo won't do anything for the controller card, its a seperate device.

Suppose it depends on whether the card supports AHCI. It does say on scan it supports NCQ, which IIRC is a feature within AHCI.
Although the page on Lycoms website doesn't say anything about AHCI.

Don't know how controller cards work having never used one, but are there any settings for it in the Bios, like in the PCI devices section or something?

Seeing as its got an eSATA port on it, I would have thought it would have to have AHCI.


Maybe an email to scan to see if they've got any idea?

 

So now I have gone through the whole BIOS, and spent quite some time fiddling,

By pressing ctrl + M it brings you into the BIOS of the card, however there is only one setting, and that is to make a virtual drive from two physical drives, which will then be be in RAID 0 or 1 mode in AHCI but I don't have an eSATA drive I can connect to the other port to enable this. There are no other options on the cards BIOS at all just the one. If there is a way of changing it from the motherboard's BIOS I would really love to know how!

The card must definitely support AHCI because of the RAID feature, therefore there must be a way of fixing this.

 

any reason you have a separate controller card, rather than connecting direct to the motherboard? Have you ran out of ports?

If so, may be worth swapping a device off the mobo to the card, so the SSD can connect direct to the mobo

 

Yeah my motherboard only has SATA II connections which limit the speed of an ssd to 3gb/s whereas my controller card 'states' that it has a SATA III connection which has speeds of 6GB/s, and i really want to take advantage of the full speed of my SSD.

 

So the 2 options are IDE or RAID? AHCI is usually a subset of RAID (eg NCQ is an AHCI command that is supported in a lot of RAID controllers) so choosing RAID (and using the SSD as it is and not creating a multi disk array) may be the best option for top speed. I was surprised at how seriously crappy the Lycom site was, it may be best to try and contact their support. As far as I am aware the only AHCI command of any significance that may not be supported by RAID is TRIM, again I think all you can do is confirm this with lycom now, pretty sucky

 

Unfortunately there is no option for that, it is either make a multi disk array in the Bios for the card, or don't! If you opt not to make a multi disk array then by default it sets the SSD to IDE, which is awful.