Samsung 830 - Motherboard problem

[marada]

I would be really grateful for some help as to how I can get my Samsung 830 SSD 256gb working properly with my motherboard. I have spend days trying to figure this out and have had no joy

I have the ASROCK ALiveDual-eSATA2 motherboard (latest bios) shown at this link:

http://www.asrock.com/mb/NVIDIA/ALiveDual-eSATA2/

The SATA 2 ports are controlled by the JMicron JMB363 chipset controller. This is shown under device manager in windows XP under the heading of SCSI / RAID controllers. The problem is when I go to use the Samsung Magician software (essential under XP for garbage deletion etc since XP has no Trim support)a message says "no Samsung SSD found" The only way I have got this to work is by replacing the JMicron device with a standard IDE controller and it is then fully recognised by the magician software. Unfortunately I have been unable to replace it with any AHCI controller. The other SATA ports on my motherboard are only SATA 1 and are controlled by a NVIDIA nForce3 250 south bridge chipset . Again Magician won't recognise the drive if I connect it to the NVIDIA SATA ports and again I have to remove the NVIDIA driver and replace them with a standard IDE controller. I want to know why the drive magician software won't work with the correct controllers on my motherboard? As a result I have had to resort to standard IDE controllers. As an experiment I got another drive and installed windows 7 on it. In windows 7 the SATA 2 ports controlled by the JMicron controller are listed under device manager as Standard AHCI 1.0 Serial ATA Controller and as such the drive is recognised by the magician software. I tried to copy the Standard AHCI 1.0 Serial ATA Controller driver from windows 7 over to my XP install, however when I try to replace the JMicron driver on my XP install with the standard ATI driver from windows 7 I just get the blue screen of death on reboot. Does anyone know if there are any standard AHCI Microsoft controller drivers that I can replace the JMicron with in XP (like in windows 7)?

My other problem is no matter what I do the drive is vastly underperforming. No matter if I use the JMicron controller, Standard IDE (in XP), or the Standard AHCI 1.0 Serial ATA Controller in Windows 7 I only get performance for read and write of about 100 Mb/S. This is a long way behind the SATA 2 speed expected. How can I improve this?

My main priority is to get this working properly in Xp (although it would be nice to see it working under any operating system) as I have some very expensive commercial hardware that only works in XP and I would really benefit from the speed that my SSD could yield in that environment.

 

[Coup27]

Unfortunately the problem is the motherboard. JMicron and nVidia are not known for making quality storage ports and as soon as I looked at your motherboards spec sheet I took a deep breath.

I have an 830 in my rig and I have also put them in a number of other PCs now but they have all been Intel. Each one has performed like a little solider so I have no doubt that it is not the drives fault.

My advice would be to swap to a more modern motherboard. You can still install XP on it and keep your requirements.

 

[marada]

Do you think there are any other makes of SSD that would perform better with this board?

Swapping to a more modern board is not an option. I do a lot of SD video capture / restoration and the best card for this is an old AGP card. Thats why I got the board. I love the board apart from the storage ports since I am running a quad core and it will hold up to 16GB ram which is great for dual booting.

Are there any workarounds you can think of? It seems strange on this baord that the SATA 1 and SATA 2 ports seem to perform at about the same speed.

 

[Coup27]

The only other SSD manufacturer which makes an SSD toolbox with a manual TRIM function is Intel, so your shortlist is very short. Whether it will perform any different is a total gamble.

I know nothing of SD video capture or restoration but I do find it hard to believe that an old AGP card is better than what is on the market at the moment. Why is 16GB of RAM great for dual booting? You're only booting one OS at a time.

There are no work arounds. Even the PCI Express SATA add on cards are garbage as well. Do a search in this forum for pcie 6Gbps or something similar and you will find reems of threads of people wanting 6Gbps from an add on card and getting nothing like it.

The bottom line is there simply no substitute for a native chipset port, preferably one from Intel or AMD.

 

[marada]

but I do find it hard to believe that an old AGP card is better than what is on the market at the moment

If your talking about high def video I can't agree more but decent capture cards for digitising VHS tapes uncompressed are mainly about 10 years old. There isn't a sufficient professional market for quality analogue capture equipment these days. If you come across a modern quality card to capture VHS in uncompressed format please let me know. Nothing (including the blackmagic cards come close) There are only a few modern solutions with the quality of previous years, however they are big big bucks. The same can also be said for VHS players, the best stuff is now more than 10 years old. The majority of VHS players made now are just rubbish

 

[Coup27]

Like I said, I know nothing of that field so I will take your word on that. But if you have to run old hardware you cannot expect to put one in of the fastest SSDs 2012 has to offer and expect it to run as well as you've seen.

Unfortunately the storage ports on your motherboard are crud so it is something I think you are going to have to live with. If you leave the computer idle for a few hours then the drives internal garbage collection should do a decent job of keeping it in a good state. Even in a degraded state it will still be much faster than a HDD.

 

[marada]

Well I think it's disgusting that Asrock can get away with making the claims they have with regards to the board. Regardless of having an SSD or not the SATA 2 ports on the board are no faster than the SATA 1 ports. This can be tested with any SATA drive. How the hell do they get away with such marketing?

Just out of interest if the SATA ports had decent controllers such as intel how close would the 830SSD get to the maximum theoretical transfer rate of a SATA 2 port? What is terms of mbs would you expect to see as I know most ports can never achieve there theoretical maximum in the real world.

Also any idea if I would have better luck with the ULI controllers on this board:

http://www.asrock.com/mb/ULI/939Dual-SATA2/

 

[Coup27]

Probably the same way all of these people who release 3rd party 6Gbps cards or motherboard controllers that don't meet anywhere near the advertised specs. I agree with you that its shit though.

The 830 would easily saturate a native Intel 3Gbps connection. By saturate, we're talking 285mb/sec maximum.

I have no idea how those storage ports would perform. At a guess I would say similar to what you have now. Intel are streets ahead in their storage ports with AMD behind. Everything else is generally dog turd.