Corsair Force GS 360, installed, but what does this message mean please?

[SEIZETHEDAY4EVA]

The only thing i would say is that the windows loading screen takes a little longer to start up than before but it's now saying that my AHCI BIOS is installed so i'm still smiling.

Also tried Max Payne 3 and it loads just as quickly as before.

Is there a good programme to use to check the speed of your SSD?

 

[Cerb]

Just one thing, i installed both the SSD and DVD into the 2 white ports, is this a problem? Should i take the DVD cable and plug it into the black port to the left of the 2 white ones?

No. The SSD is all that will really take advantage of the faster speed (HDDs and ODDs are too slow on their own), but it won't hurt anything, and you can safely move it if you add another SSD. It would have been nice if GB had used 3 colors, instead of 2.

Do i need to change any settings in my BIOS now? Oh and what is eXtremeHD, i have this set to disabled because i don't know what it is, should it be enabled and if so why?

It's the new name for RAID mode, now that RAID mode has been extended to allow other things.

If Windows hasn't yet been installed, just go ahead and do that. With AHCI turned on, it will do all the right tweaks during setup and the first WEI test.

 

[Zxian]

Glad to help.

CrystalDiskMark is a good program to benchmark your drives. Just make sure that you test with a 0-fill test. Otherwise, you'll never reach your specified top speeds.

 

[Cerb]

The only thing i would say is that the windows loading screen takes a little longer to start up than before but it's now saying that my AHCI BIOS is installed so i'm still smiling.

That's the cost of using it, unfortunately.

Is there a good programme to use to check the speed of your SSD?

CrystalDiskMark is one of the more commonly-used ones.

Again thank you ZXIAN and same goes to you Cerb.........LEGENDS!!!

No,we just have to deal with crap too often, because what aught to, "just work," often doesn't.

 

[Zxian]

If Windows hasn't yet been installed, just go ahead and do that. With AHCI turned on, it will do all the right tweaks during setup and the first WEI test.

Either if Windows hasn't been installed, or if you don't have too much setup in Windows just yet. It's often faster and easier to simply reinstall with all the hardware setup correctly than it would be to try to apply all the little changes afterwards.

 

[Cerb]

Either if Windows hasn't been installed, or if you don't have too much setup in Windows just yet. It's often faster and easier to simply reinstall with all the hardware setup correctly than it would be to try to apply all the little changes afterwards.

Yes, but that doesn't always happen, and doing it after the fact can be faster with applications installed and set up. It happens. With Windows 7, the AHCI reg hack, turning off Superfetch and/or indexed locations if you like, then running a WEI test, is basically it, so it's really not bad at all (and, it won't hurt to only do the AHCI reg editing).

Linus also usually has a raging hatred for anything that wasn't developed out of the *nix world. I always take his commentary with a grain of salt. ^_^

He's often right, but I sig'ed it because I got good chuckle out of reading it. Disconnected from the UEFI context (UEFI existed already, so that's what we have, and everyone can hate on it like they hated on BIOS, just for different reasons), it is often all too true. I think he's right in general with UEFI; but adopting a flawed standard that has already had known-good implementations was probably a better choice than trying to come up with something new, in the hopes that it won't be screwed up in worse ways.

 

[SEIZETHEDAY4EVA]

When i freshly installed Windows 7 after installing the SSD i remember that i didn't have eXtremeHD enabled, it was disabled for sure but i did have all the other settings at the time set to AHCI, so i can just leave it as it is right, no need to set eXtrememHD to enabled and then format and reinstall everything right?

 

[Cerb]

There shouldn't be, no.

If Windows' internal secret random performance test was fast enough, it will have automatically disabled Superfetch.

Regardless of interface or speed, seeing an SSD, Windows should have automatically aligned the partitions.

Regardless of speed or interface, Windows 7 should ignore the SSD when it comes to defragging (the service being enabled is not an indicator that it is doing any harm to your SSD).

Also, Windows 7 by itself isn't the storage I/O pig that Vista was, and those IOPs savings benefit users of any supported drive technology.

Getting the most out of the drive in XP or Vista can take a little more work, but 7 has good defaults; so you pretty much need to (1) not clone/migrate from a HDD install, and (2) make sure the driver can use NCQ, which is the main point of turning on AHCI (MS decided that their AHCI driver would be needed all the new fancy SATA features, like NCQ, hotplugging, and TRIM, without using vendor drivers).

I'd go ahead and run a WEI test, just to make sure Windows caught up on the changes (as long as the numbers are as high as expected, the score itself doesn't matter), and leave it at that.

 

[SEIZETHEDAY4EVA]

I just ran the WEI test and got a score of 7.6 for basic score and subscore as below:

Processor: 7.6
Memory: 7.6
Graphics: 7.9
Gaming: 7.9
Primary hard drive: 7.9

As the WEI test scores on a scale of 1.0 to 7.9 i'm assuming my computer and SSD is in good shape right?