Intel Communities: Message List - Will Toolbox work without AHCI?

Re: Will Toolbox work without AHC

webadmin@intel.com — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 20:30:44 GMT

Hello, I am using Micron's C300 256gb drive on a Dell 730 with an NVidia 790i Ultra chipset. I boot through an Asus U3S6 card mounted in a PCIe x 16 slot. I have limited software installed on my PC at the moment, so I cant give a screen shot, but the drive benchmarks in ATTO at ~370/210mb/s. Here is an AS SSD bench I just took.

Regards

Mitch

Re: Will Toolbox work without AHCI?

webadmin@intel.com — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 18:27:15 GMT

Hi Bilsko/ Smal/ Xact,

Would any of you guys mind running an AS SSD Benchmark? I’m interested to see what the Marvell 9123 controller does to performance. I recently tried an Adaptec 1220SA as part of a temporary trouble shooting exercise and it nearly halved my overall AS Benchmark score in comparison to ICH9.

It’s possible to obtain a screen shot or just the text results of the benchmark via Edit>Copy

http://www.alex-is.de/PHP/fusion/downloads.php?cat_id=4

Thanks

Re: Will Toolbox work without AHCI?

webadmin@intel.com — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 17:23:06 GMT

Following your example I installed a U3S6 on my XPS 720. It worked just great! Thanks for sharing.

Re: Will Toolbox work without AHCI?

webadmin@intel.com — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 20:52:54 GMT

I tried Xact's recommendation using the ASUS SATA6 board to bypass the NVIDIA SATA controller and it works great. AHCI enabled and Toolbox running just fine.

Re: Will Toolbox work without AHCI?

webadmin@intel.com — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 15:16:42 GMT

xact - thanks for the followup. Sounds like this is a no-brainer. Going to get the card. $25 on Amazon - just slightly cheaper than Newegg, so I'm going to get it. Will follow your instructions to make sure the AHCI drivers are enabled. Will try the first setup you recommend - although I think at some point while tinkering with the original install I actually did change the registry value for the AHCI driver.

Will probably take a week or so to get the card shipped, I'll post once I've done everything to update.

Re: Will Toolbox work without AHCI?

webadmin@intel.com — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 14:22:39 GMT

Once a drive is plugged into the add-in card, the BIOS will recognize it as a boot candidate and will add it into the BIOS' "boot sequence" list along with your mobo-connected drives, mobo RAID, CD-ROM, USB, etc. So it is treated no differently than any other potentially bootable hardware. From the boot sequence list, you can enable/disable it as a boot device as well as move it up/down the priority list. (Obviously, you will want to place it at or near the top.)

Other than adding roughly one second to the boot sequence, I haven't found a downside to running the ASUS card. If you look up reviews, you'll find the device is actually PCI-E 4x and uses a bridge chip in order try to obtain enough bandwidth for 2x SATA 6G and 2x USB 3.0 devices... so it should be able to handle a single SATA II SSD with ease. (I installed mine in the 720's bottom 16x slot.) It is also cheaper than the other single-function/1x cards on the market, so seemed like a no-brainer to me.

Remember that you'll want to enable Windows' AHCI driver before switching your boot drive. Do this either A) by installing the card, booting (let Windows detect hardware), then shutting down and switching cabling/boot priority... or B) by editing the registry key in Windows before installing the card and then reconfiguring the cabling/BIOS.

Re: Will Toolbox work without AHCI?

webadmin@intel.com — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 01:10:34 GMT

xact - thanks for the tip. I'm looking into the ASUS card right now (also nice to have USB 3.0 for whenever that comes around too). One question on the BIOS setup - I'm assuming that since the SSD isn't plugged directly into the MoBo, it doesn't get the same Boot status as HDDs plugged into the SATA controller. You said that BIOS allowed you to select it as a Boot device; does it just show up on the list of devices like booting from USB or LAN?

I assume that since its PCI-E, that its connecting to the Southbridge at at least 500 MB/s - so there shouldn't be any throughput bottlenecks there right? My understanding is that SATA connections are typically around 300 MB/s anyways, so the PCI-E isn't slowing down the data transfer any more than the standard SATA connection would anyways.

Finally, I assume that there are no cable issues with the SATA-II cable from the SSD into the SATA6 ports on the card - the SATA connections have the same form factor for SATA-II on the SSD and the SATA6 on the card right?

Re: Will Toolbox work without AHCI?

webadmin@intel.com — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:33:41 GMT

I have an XPS 720 with a 680i-based mobo/clunky nvidia SATA hardware and was in the same boat as you guys. Performance was fine, but I had no Trim support, no SSD Toolbox, and firmware had to be upgraded using a different machine.

To bypass the restrictive nvidia hardware, I ended up purchasing a $29 ASUS U3S6 PCI-E add-in card to control my SSD. This ended up working out very well; once the SSD was connected to the new controller, my BIOS allowed me to select it as a boot device instead of the mobo's controller. I left my bulk storage drives connected to the motherboard's SATA ports.

The U3S6 has 2 SATA 6G ports and is based on a Marvell 9123 controller. This controller is picked up by Windows as a standard AHCI device and works fine with the MS AHCI drivers. Intel's SSD Toolbox is now 100% functional and I assume Trim is working as it should since I'm using the MS drivers.

There are other add-in cards on the market based on the same controller that would do the same job. Whatever you get, just make sure it will work with the standard MS AHCI drivers.

Re: Will Toolbox work without AHCI?

webadmin@intel.com — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 08:22:57 GMT

Hello

I have exactly the same problem that "Bilsko" has. Almost the same set up aswell. A nForce 570-chip. I have gone so far with this I´m about to replace my nForrce-MB with a new Intel-based MB.

I don´t have the option of replacing the "NVIDIA nForce Serial ATA Controllers" with "Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controllers".

When updating to latest firmware I had to put the disk in another computer that had a Intel chip.

We must be some ppl with this problem. My X25-M 160Gb needs to be TRIMED!!

/Niklas

Re: Will Toolbox work without AHCI?

webadmin@intel.com — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 14:19:21 GMT

@ Bilsko:

Your screenshot of the Device Manager makes it very clear, that RAID has not been enabled.

So you should be able to replace all "NVIDIA nForce Serial ATA Controllers" by "Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controllers".

Only this way you will get the full Trim support.