Confusing results with Crucial M4 and AMD SB750

[mikeymikec]

Board: ASUS M4A78T-E, latest BIOS

To begin with, the board is SATA II capable, but when I connected 2x Crucial M4 SSDs with almost the latest firmware, they came up in the BIOS as only being SATA 1.5G (a Seagate HDD on the same system comes up as SATA 3G).

I tried a few things like a BIOS/CMOS reset, changing the storage configuration to any available option, but it made no difference.

I set up the SSDs in RAID1, installed Windows 7 64-bit SP1 (latest AMD RAID driver), and used ATTO to benchmark. Some of the results pushed 200MB/sec, and the latest two were over 400MB/sec. I can post a screenshot if requested.

Confused. If ATTO's benchmark is to be believed then I'm happy about it. Win7 doesn't boot particularly quickly (the Windows logo has time to go through its full animation and then some, which is unusual with an SSD, but due to previous experience with AMD RAID on this board I'll chalk that one up as a driver issue), but after booting it feels like a system booting off an SSD should.

WinSAT's disk benchmark comes out as 7.9.

 

[aviator78]

Win7 doesn't boot particularly quickly (the Windows logo has time to go through its full animation and then some, ...

You can go to "run" -> msconfig and check the option "no GUI start". This disables the logo animation. If you boot faster after that, the logo animation was a break for boot.

 

[mikeymikec]

I'm not sure what you mean. The logo animation doesn't hold up the boot process, I've see newer systems that I've built including SSDs boot quicker, interrupting that animation.

In other interesting news, the AMD RAID management software lists the drives as being 6GBit/s capable. I wouldn't normally expect to see that on a system that is only SATA II capable, though I can't think of a reason why it shouldn't be possible for an older system to detect that a drive is capable of higher speeds than the system can deliver.

 

[Cerb]

In other interesting news, the AMD RAID management software lists the drives as being 6GBit/s capable. I wouldn't normally expect to see that on a system that is only SATA II capable, though I can't think of a reason why it shouldn't be possible for an older system to detect that a drive is capable of higher speeds than the system can deliver.

That's exactly it. The drive is 6Gbps capable.

But, anyway, if Atto is giving you a 400MBps read figure for both drives in a RAID 1, that's 2x3Gbps. The SB750 has no SSD optimizations (SB800 and newer do), so the speeds won't approach what you see with rigs using newer chipsets, AMD or Intel.

However, just to be safe, bring up SMART values (CrystalDiskInfo is good, if you've got nothing for it right now), and make sure there's no interface CRC errors. I have a feeling it's just the older hardware, and everything is really fine, but won't hurt to check, and that could definitely cause wonky speed results.

 

[mikeymikec]

CrystalDiskInfo doesn't detect any drives, presumably because they're in the RAID array.

I did a bit of googling which suggests that with AMD RAID, reading SMART data is problematic.

I've updated the drive firmware using the boot ISO method Crucial provides. It didn't require changing the SATA operation from RAID, which makes me a bit happier in the long term if there are any more firmware updates for this model (I don't much like the idea of having to switch off RAID and hope the drive configuration comes back when I switch it back on!).