256GB M225 Windows 7 will install on SATA 3.0 but won't boot. ASRock X58 Extreme 3

[MerrickAggie97]

Hey guys,

Im completely new to using SSDs. I got a new motherboard (ASRock X58 Extreme 3) with the intention of being able to take advantage of SATA 6Gbps from the Marvell SE9128 onboard controller.

I tried putting my SSD on this port and the BIOS and even the Windows 7 installation would recognize it as being present and would even complete installation prior to the first restart. However, once it was time to restart the OS wouldnt load and would be unable to complete installation. I tried changing to ACHI and IDE and neither made a difference.

The only way I was able to get the SSD to work (ala completely install Windows 7) was to put it on the main SATA ports that are part of the X58 chipset. Only then was I able to complete the installation and have a normal functioning Windows 7 operating computer, which is the good news.

Can anyone shed some light as to why this was happening? I really want to be able to take advantage of the additional bandwidth the SATA 3 bus provides.

 

[Old Hippie]

I'm pretty sure I've read that you can't boot from those SATA 6 ports.

Maybe not....I can't find anything...but I thought I read that because I remember thinking "That's pretty shitty and just another reason I'll wait for the Intel ICH11".


PS...

I really want to be able to take advantage of the additional bandwidth the SATA 3 bus provides.

Only some kind of SSD set-up could even touch the limits of SATA2 and if you're using mechanical drives they barely touch SATA1.

 

[MerrickAggie97]

I'm pretty sure I've read that you can't boot from those SATA 6 ports.

Maybe not....I can't find anything...but I thought I read that because I remember thinking "That's pretty shitty and just another reason I'll wait for the Intel ICH11".


PS...

Only some kind of SSD set-up could even touch the limits of SATA2 and if you're using mechanical drives they barely touch SATA1.

Yes you can boot from the SATA3 ports. Prior to getting my SSD drive I had two hard drives running in RAID 0 from that and they booted just fine.

 

[Old Hippie]

Yes you can boot from the SATA3 ports. Prior to getting my SSD drive I had two hard drives running in RAID 0 from that and they booted just fine.

Welp, there's my learnin' for the day!

 

[MerrickAggie97]

Anyone have anything to add?

 

[adamantinepiggy]

SATA3 is relatively new. As such, the existing add-on SATA3 chipsets tend to be pretty damn flaky about what works or not. It is exacerbated more by how the MB makers integrate the controller chipsets onto their motherboards. Some do it better than others, but even the best ones still suffer from the fact that the controller chips are so flaky both hardware-wise and driver-wise when compared to the standard motherboard SATA mains by Intel or AMD. It's even worse with add-on PCI/PCIe cards, even with earlier SATA2 specs.

Even if you manage to get a SATA3 SSD to work with a SATA3 controller, chances are, that except maybe a few read speed maximums, most other functions/processes are better/faster on the motherboards main SATA2 ports, just because the drivers and hardware have been used a long while and fine tuned.

How do I know? I'm the guy that sets up the hundreds of different motherboard combinations and controller cards for the SSD firmware engineers to tune the SSD's on. I have to make the SSD's "work" on the systems/components before the engineers can "tune" them. While I don't mind spending lots of time on "my" system at home, I HATE spending hours of work time trying to make some of the junk work especially since I don't get to do anything with it after !

For every compatibility problem you see, I probably see and experience many hundreds times over, and cuss every second of it just like you do. Just recently there was an issue with a public-released firmware that was bricking our SSD's on a few of our customer's PC's (of course if spent that much retail money oon an SSD, I'd be pissed too). I had to personally hit about 100 different mainstream motherboards with a optical CD/DVDROM drive and attempt to flash the firmware of an SSD attached to each SATA port controller, "just like a customer would have to". Couple the fact that each motherboard had at least two SATA and/or eSATA controllers and I had to try different settings in the BIOS (like AHCI and IDE mode), and also with discrete controller BIOS firmware on or off this took a hella long time. Add the time to reflash/de-brick the SSD's back to the old firmware each time and watch the hours of tedium drag by...

In most every case, if there was a firmware upgrade/flashing issue, it was generally when the SSD was connected to some non-Intel/AMD (with Intel hardware better than AMD's) SATA controller. If there was any problems with flashing the SSD on the main INTEL/AMD SATA ports, it would tend to happen when the secondary SATA controller's BIOS was enabled on the motherboards BIOS, even though the SSD was not directly attached to the secondary controller...

Sorry, rambling... Suffice to say that SATA3 is still often a crapshoot (compared to SATA2). I do expect it to get better, but until more devices come out that support SATA3 you will continue to see weird compatibility issues.

 

[MerrickAggie97]

Well for now maybe Ill just leave it on the SATA II port.

I am thinking about getting another SSD and doing RAID 0. How will that work?!!

 

[adamantinepiggy]

Well for now maybe Ill just leave it on the SATA II port.

I am thinking about getting another SSD and doing RAID 0. How will that work?!!

Well first off, most every SSD will work in RAID0, thing is though, it depends on why you think you need to do it. "Most" people judge their SSD's on the improvement in operating system boot times and responsiveness. If an SSD "benches" like crazy and blows every other benchmark out of the water, but takes Windows an extra 2 minutes to load, compared to the SSD's that don't bench as well, the vast majority of people will opt for the worse benching SSD every damn time, because boot times are IMPORTANT.

That being said, RAID0 with fast SSD's does not show big "perceptable" speed increases for doing most "normal" things over a single fast SSD when doing most things. Yes it is faster, but is it worth the effort? RAID0 made sense with slow hard drives or a server-type environment (where you need the IOP's), while it still improves SSD's, it's not the big "WOWSER'S" you get going from hard drives to SSDs in home PC's.

So basically, going from a typical single hard drive Windows to a RAID0 hard drive Windows setup will make you smile. Going from a typical hard drive Windows boot to a good SSD Windows boot, will make you think "DAMN! That's cool!". Going from a single SSD Windows boot to a RAID0 SSD Windows boot will make you think "meh, did I set it up right?"...

Now if it's about benches, then yeah you will see big numbers with RAID0 SSD's, but typical things like boot times, WoWarcraft load/zoning screens, loading your browser, loading games, etc will not show much real benefit. In fact, the added time cause by RAID and/or controller initialization can make boot times longer.

Don't get me wrong though, if it's for fun, numbers, and bragging rights, go for it. That's why I tried it myself, but for most real-world "normal" use, it's not really worth it with fast SSD's.

There are some people like myself though who will put up with some horrible boot times in the pursuit of playtime benchmarks, but we do tend to realize it's for fun and not necessarily practical. Some caching server RAID hard drive controller setups took FOREVER to initialize and load, but once they were up and running, WHEEEEEE!

 

[faxon]

Anyone have anything to add?

yea, your drive is only SATA2 so you wont get any benefit from SATA3 at all. i have the same drive as you (supertalent brand but the PCB/controller are identical), works great, but definitely wont see a damn bit of difference going to a faster interface unless they update the controller also. best off just moving it to a SATA2 port and calling it a day

 

[MerrickAggie97]

Well first off, most every SSD will work in RAID0, thing is though, it depends on why you think you need to do it. "Most" people judge their SSD's on the improvement in operating system boot times and responsiveness. If an SSD "benches" like crazy and blows every other benchmark out of the water, but takes Windows an extra 2 minutes to load, compared to the SSD's that don't bench as well, the vast majority of people will opt for the worse benching SSD every damn time, because boot times are IMPORTANT.

That being said, RAID0 with fast SSD's does not show big "perceptable" speed increases for doing most "normal" things over a single fast SSD when doing most things. Yes it is faster, but is it worth the effort? RAID0 made sense with slow hard drives or a server-type environment (where you need the IOP's), while it still improves SSD's, it's not the big "WOWSER'S" you get going from hard drives to SSDs in home PC's.

So basically, going from a typical single hard drive Windows to a RAID0 hard drive Windows setup will make you smile. Going from a typical hard drive Windows boot to a good SSD Windows boot, will make you think "DAMN! That's cool!". Going from a single SSD Windows boot to a RAID0 SSD Windows boot will make you think "meh, did I set it up right?"...

Now if it's about benches, then yeah you will see big numbers with RAID0 SSD's, but typical things like boot times, WoWarcraft load/zoning screens, loading your browser, loading games, etc will not show much real benefit. In fact, the added time cause by RAID and/or controller initialization can make boot times longer.

Don't get me wrong though, if it's for fun, numbers, and bragging rights, go for it. That's why I tried it myself, but for most real-world "normal" use, it's not really worth it with fast SSD's.

There are some people like myself though who will put up with some horrible boot times in the pursuit of playtime benchmarks, but we do tend to realize it's for fun and not necessarily practical. Some caching server RAID hard drive controller setups took FOREVER to initialize and load, but once they were up and running, WHEEEEEE!

Well Im more interested in getting more space. 512 from 256 is pretty big.

 

[EarthwormJim]

Did you enable the boot bios on the marvel controller? Add-in controllers need their own boot bios's enabled in order to be bootable since they're basically PCI-E cards.

 

[adamantinepiggy]

Well Im more interested in getting more space. 512 from 256 is pretty big.

Not sure I'm understanding RAID0 simply for more "space" reasons. RAID0 is generally implemented for performance reasons, but not just additional space reasons. Yes setting up 2 SSD's in RAID0 will essentially give you 1 drive with 2x the capacity, but if it's simply about capacity, there's other ways to do that too.

If it's simply for more space, just install your 2nd SSD as another drive. If you want to want to use one drive letter, then you can span the volumes. RAID0 performance will be better than doing it this way, but as I mentioned before, performance is relative and spanning an add-on volume is generally easier that making a bootable RAID from an running computer. You basically just add a drive and tell Windows to span an existing drive over to it. Neither RAID0 or spanning volumes provides any redundancy.

If you want a little bit more space, you can also compress the SSD drives. With modern high-powered CPU's (which I assume you have since you can afford 256Gb SSD's) on-the-fly drive compressing/decompressing is a trivial load, and you get more space on SSD's without feeling any slowdowns. Obviously space on compressed drives is dependent on the types of files on it.

Personally I like having lots of seperate drives on my "usable work" PC's (as opposed to my toy/test PC's), for the simple fact that if a drive dies for any reason, it doesn't affect other drive data. I'm not good on backing up stuff as I should be, so if something is gonna get lost, I prefer it to be as little as possible ;-) . I don't mind seeing a continuous A to K drive letters in Windows Explorer. Not like I'm doing anything else with those drive letters .

 

[MerrickAggie97]

Did you enable the boot bios on the marvel controller? Add-in controllers need their own boot bios's enabled in order to be bootable since they're basically PCI-E cards.

Didnt have any problems when my two regular hard drives were connected to it.

 

[EarthwormJim]

Didnt have any problems when my two regular hard drives were connected to it.

You could boot from those drives?

 

[MerrickAggie97]

You could boot from those drives?

Yes. That was my setup before I got the SSD.

 

[EarthwormJim]

Yes. That was my setup before I got the SSD.

Maybe see if a BIOS update is available, or a firmware update for the SATA controller is available.

 

[Burner27]

Check the boot order. Make sure your Marvell SATA 6 controller onboard is set to boot first in the list.

 

[MerrickAggie97]

Check the boot order. Make sure your Marvell SATA 6 controller onboard is set to boot first in the list.

I did that. I said as much in my first post.

 

[Burner27]

I did that. I said as much in my first post.

Is that HDD set with the active partition? Did it create the 'reserved space' that windows normally creates when first installing? (100MB)?

I tried putting my SSD on this port and the BIOS and even the Windows 7 installation would recognize it as being present and would even complete installation prior to the first restart.

This doesn't tell me you set the boot order to boot to an add-in controller first. Do you have such a setting?

 

[MerrickAggie97]

Is that HDD set with the active partition? Did it create the 'reserved space' that windows normally creates when first installing? (100MB)?



This doesn't tell me you set the boot order to boot to an add-in controller first. Do you have such a setting?

Yes, to both questions. BEFORE I had the SSD I had two regular hard drives with windows 7 running in a RAID 0 off of that same controller and it (obviously ;-)) was set to boot first and it did without issue.

Thats why the issue with the SSD is so puzzling.

 

[Burner27]

Your solution is trade me your SSD for my Intel 80GB SSD & Patriot Torqx 128GB SSD.

 

[MerrickAggie97]

Your solution is trade me your SSD for my Intel 80GB SSD & Patriot Torqx 128GB SSD.

I do wonder if it needs to be in RAID mode though. I might get a 2nd 256GB HD in the fall so I can get a full 512GB of SSD space. I do also hope to get two Radeon 5890 cards. Hopefully they will be out since the 5870 series is still overpriced.

 

[Burner27]

I do wonder if it needs to be in RAID mode though. I might get a 2nd 256GB HD in the fall so I can get a full 512GB of SSD space. I do also hope to get two Radeon 5890 cards. Hopefully they will be out since the 5870 series is still overpriced.

You must make a lotta $$$.

 

[EarthwormJim]

I do wonder if it needs to be in RAID mode though. I might get a 2nd 256GB HD in the fall so I can get a full 512GB of SSD space. I do also hope to get two Radeon 5890 cards. Hopefully they will be out since the 5870 series is still overpriced.

Have you tried using the other port on the controller? On my Asus P45 board (it's not 6gbps though), only one port is bootable in non-raid mode.

 

[MerrickAggie97]

Have you tried using the other port on the controller? On my Asus P45 board (it's not 6gbps though), only one port is bootable in non-raid mode.

I tried it on the port labelled port 0.

I guess I could try this, but Im less motivated to deal with it since I now know that I won't get much benefit of going to 6Gbps.