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SSD and no AHCI - problem?

R

rogigor

Junior Member
Hi,

I'm about to buy a Crucial m4 ssd and I've read a lot of guides how to optimize system for the drive. One of the points is to turn the AHCI in the bios but as I have just found out, my Abit IP35-E (Sata II, ICH9) does not support AHCI.

Does it have a big impact on performance ? I mean I don't care about benchmarks - I mean real life usage like, boot, programs launching etc. And how about TRIM - doesn't it have to have AHCI turned on ?

P.S. - I am also considering buying Kingston V+200 which, is worse than M4 but since it's on SandForce 2281 controller it has better built-in garbage collection. What do you think ?
 
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Well you can turn on AHCI thru a registry trick. The performance will be the same. For example Im at 260mbps and doing trick same 260 still. No change in boot up or app launch. People with RAID like to use that. For you just leave it alone.
 
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TB, that registry hack only enable the AHCI driver stack. It still has to be enabled in BIOS and hardware.

OP, basically, AHCI is needed for hotplug support, and it allows limited storage device multitasking through the use of NCQ. If you don't have AHCI, expect your 4K-64thrd benchmarks to be no higher than your 4K benchmarks in CDM.
 
rogigor said:
Hi,

I'm about to buy a Crucial m4 ssd and I've read a lot of guides how to optimize system for the drive. One of the points is to turn the AHCI in the bios but as I have just found out, my Abit IP35-E (Sata II, ICH9) does not support AHCI.
Click to expand...
I'm pretty sure you can install Intel's RST and get NCQ w/ native non-AHCI SATA. NCQ is where the performance advantage comes from.

P.S. - I am also considering buying Kingston V+200 which, is worse than M4 but since it's on SandForce 2281 controller it has better built-in garbage collection. What do you think ?
Click to expand...
The GC might be a bit more aggressive, but it's the compression that let's it get well under 1 WA, and there is a cost to that (performance reduces from use more than drives that get >1 WA). In 5-10 years, we'll really need such tricks, but today, you're talking about the difference between a 20+ year lifetime and 30+ year lifetime. All kinds of meh and shoulder-shrugging, IMO. IoW, "better," is not absolute, nor even objective, in this situation.
 
There will not be a noticeable real world difference if you run the drive in IDE and not AHCI.
 
GoSharks said:
TRIM does not require AHCI.
Click to expand...

Well I've already send an email to Crucial about that. If It is true than I have no problem.

Assuming I do not need AHCI for TRIM which of the SSDs would you take - Crucial M4 64gb or Kingston V+200 120Gb ? (price for both is very similar in my case)
 
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Coup27 said:
There will not be a noticeable real world difference if you run the drive in IDE and not AHCI.
Click to expand...

I hate to be picky, but the alternate mode to AHCI is ATA, not IDE. IDE is a design condition (Integrated Drive Electronics) of hard drives, not a mode. I realize that IDE has become a common but inaccurate term for some HDDs, but it is not correct.

Anyway, your statement is correct if you replace IDE with ATA. 🙂
 
Coup27 said:
There will not be a noticeable real world difference if you run the drive in IDE and not AHCI.
Click to expand...

I noticed a real world difference when going from ide mode to ahci with my x25m g2. I probably wouldn't have noticed the difference if I had gone back and forth between them when first getting the drive, but after using it for 18 mos or so with ide it was a very noticeable upgrade going to ahci.

edit: or ATA or whatever it's called.

rogigor said:
Well I've already send an email to Crucial about that. If It is true than I have no problem.

Assuming I do not need AHCI for TRIM which of the SSDs would you take - Crucial M4 64gb or Kingston V+200 120Gb ? (price for both is very similar in my case)
Click to expand...

I was able to manually TRIM my x25m g2 when it was in ata/ide mode. However, I know that crucial doesn't have an ssd toolbox to allow this and I don't think that Kingston does, either. What OS are you using? I'd stay away from sf 2281 ssd's other than intels, the GC on others is still pretty good.
 
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corkyg said:
I hate to be picky, but the alternate mode to AHCI is ATA, not IDE. IDE is a design condition (Integrated Drive Electronics) of hard drives, not a mode. I realize that IDE has become a common but inaccurate term for some HDDs, but it is not correct.

Anyway, your statement is correct if you replace IDE with ATA. 🙂
Click to expand...
Whilst true, the fast that most BIOS' out there all have "SATA Controller mode - AHCI or IDE" compounds the problem to a point where that if you don't refer to it also as IDE, people ask you "wtf is ATA?"

Screwed either way.
 
bryanW1995 said:
I was able to manually TRIM my x25m g2 when it was in ata/ide mode. However, I know that crucial doesn't have an ssd toolbox to allow this and I don't think that Kingston does, either. What OS are you using? I'd stay away from sf 2281 ssd's other than intels, the GC on others is still pretty good.
Click to expand...


I am currently using Vista x64 but I'm going to switch to 7 x64 after the purchase.

I have just got the answer from crucial and they say that TRIM works only in AHCI. Well I will just buy the SSD as I was going to anyway and will test in on my own. If I am happy with the performance (and comparing to my hdd I probably will) then ok. If, however, I have some problems or drops in pefrormance, I will ... sight... upgrade to 1155.
 
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rogigor said:
I have just got the answer from crucial and they say that TRIM works only in AHCI. .
Click to expand...

This contradicts the MSI faq

http://www.ocztechnology.com/ssdzone/ssd-faqs.html

also the OCZ faq is a good read as well

http://www.ocztechnology.com/ssdzone/ssd-faqs.html

I tend to believe the MSI faq simply because IDE has been around longer than AHCI, and both of them predate SSD's.

TRIM should not be dependent upon AHCI, but merely the drive itself and the host operating system.
 
rogigor said:
I am currently using Vista x64 but I'm going to switch to 7 x64 after the purchase.

I have just got the answer from crucial and they say that TRIM works only in AHCI. Well I will just buy the SSD as I was going to anyway and will test in on my own. If I am happy with the performance (and comparing to my hdd I probably will) then ok. If, however, I have some problems or drops in pefrormance, I will ... sight... upgrade to 1155.
Click to expand...

I agree with the other posters, and my own experience was that I was able to manually TRIM even in XP. You likely got bad info from crucial tech support.

Regardless, I haven't TRIMMED by m4's since I got them (as they're in RAID 0), and I haven't noticed any dropoff. The GC on these newer ssd's is pretty awesome, a casual or moderate user could never TRIM a newer ssd and still maintain nearly-new performance indefinitely.
 
Emulex said:
kingston suck ballz at any QD and have heavy GC so they will be perfect for IDE mode!
Click to expand...
They got a firmware update to help with that, and it seems to work, from what accounts I've read. In particular, low QD performance isn't the same as QD1, where it would trend that way. With that in mind, it shouldn't be a bad drive, especially on sale for $60-70 for 128GB, but it's nothing to get excited over, and not worth paying full price for. In fact, it's about perfect as a cheap SSD that a big vendor could just label as, "xxxGB MLC NAND solid state drive," and not get customer outrage as they charge 50-100% their costs for a cheap SSD, instead of installing something nicer 🙂.
 
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