Gigabyte Z68 SSD bios setup question

[Cykoth]

This is actually a reprint of a post from Memory and Storage. I'm not getting any responses over there, so maybe it's more relavant to the Motherboard forum.

I'm putting together a new build and as soon as I get my OCZ Vertex 3 240GB I'm going to put this thing together. I've built many computers in the past for home use, but this is my very first SSD experience. I'm going to use Win 7 64-bit Ultimate as my OS. I've been reading alot of the threads (Thanks Zap!) and I know pretty much I've just got to enable AHCI in the BIOS and I'm good to go for the most part with Win 7. The motherboard I'm using is the Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3P-B3 (I thought it was the "best" price/performance). Looking at the motherboard manual I see TWO selections for AHCI. My intention is to load the OS onto the SSD drive, and have a Hitachi 2TB HDD for mass storage. There is a selection that says

PCH SATA Control Mode (Intel Z68 Chipset) - and the selections are IDE, Raid(XHD), and AHCI.

There is another selection that says:

GSATA3 Ctrl Mode (Marvell 88SE9172 Chip, GSATA3_6 and GSATA3_7 connectors) - and the selections are IDE, AHCI, and Raid.

Now I'm thinking this has to do with the controller chips that run the 6 GB Sata ports versus the 3 GB Sata ports. So do I just set the PCH to ACHI and leave the GSATA on IDE?

I intend on hooking up just the SSD drive first for OS installation, then when that is all patched and good hooking up the HDD to my second 6GB port. The DVD drive will be connected to a 3GB SATA port.

Now here is where I'm confused again. Z68 supports SRT (Smart Response Technology....I think they should have just left it at SSD Caching). Is it POSSIBLE to have the OS installed on an SSD, and have a portion of that same SSD set up as the cache? And if so would why wouldn't I want to do that?

And here is a 3rd noob question, is there any downside to having 3 SATA peripherals connected to the same power cable (DVD, HDD, SDD) just so I have cleaner cabling in the case.

Thanks so much! I look forward to your comments.

Cykoth

*Edit*

I forgot to ask, I saw on another post that there has been a recent firmware update to the OCZ Vertex 3 series from 2.02 to 2.06. At the download site it says "Updating the firmware from the toolbox is not supported when Windows is running off the drive you are trying to update." My OS is going to be on the SSD.....What do I do about that?

Ugh......
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i7 2600K, 16 GB GSkill 1600MHz RAM, Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD3P-B3, OCZ Vertex 3 240GB, Hitachi Sata III 2TB, Antec 902 V3, Corsair HX1000 power supply, Win 7 6-bit Ultimate, 30" HP ZR30W IPS LCD, Gigabyte GTX 580 factory overclock.

 

[moralhazard]

I can address the last question. I installed an OCZ Vertex 3 120gb last week with an Asus P8Z68-V Pro.

Updating the firmware is easy once you know how to do it. I created a 32 bit ubuntu live cd and put the OCZ 32 bit Linux flasher on a USB stick. Make sure that AHCI and hot swapping are enabled in the BIOS for the SSD. After booting into ubuntu I copied the flasher from the stick to my desktop. I then gave it read/write/execute permissions. It's also essential that you have Internet access at this point since the flasher downloads the latest firmware from OCZ. You now need to check the drive location for the SSD. It's probably at /dev/sda but you can find out for sure in Disk Utility. Next open terminal and navigate to your desktop and type the following: sudo /.fwupd /dev/sda

It should now flash your firmware. I actually experienced some problems here. It either told me that my drive is not supported or that my drive is frozen/locked and that I need to power cycle. When I got the latter, I simply opened my case and disconnected the power to my drive for 10 seconds before reconnecting it. This is while still in Linux and is why we enabled hot swapping. After reconnecting it, running the same command as above worked for me and my firmware was updated to 2.06.

This actually took me longer than I hoped to figure out. It took me a while before I came across a solution that worked. I hope this saves you some time!

 

[Cykoth]

Thanks for you reply!

I've never used Ubuntu, nor have I made a bootable USB drive before. However I did see on some of the OCZ forums options for these things. I may just have to learn!

Thanks again!

Cykoth