So I have an Intel X25-M Gen 2 SSD originally installed on XP. I've since migrated to to 64-bit Windows 7 and set about optimizing this thing in several ways:
1. I wanted to perform a secure erase and after much grief, I managed that ;-)
2. I wanted to fix the alignment and after much more grief I managed that too. Great, I thought, I'll image that sucker. When I later restored that image I found that Paragon had undone my alignment. Sigh. So, I've developed a solution for that!
3. I wanted to use the optimum driver. The system is a Dell XPS 420 and I am not using RAID. The BIOS only provides for AUTO or RAID selections (no straight AHCI option).
By messing with the Registry, I've been able to boot Win 7 with the following drivers:
* pciide
* iaStorV
* iaStor (latest from Intel)
iaStorv gave the best performance but it doesn't support TRIM (as I understand it). The latest iaStor is supposed to support TRIM but it was significantly slower on simple reads (iaStorV: 247MB/s versus iaStor:186MB/s.
What I have not been able to do is make this darn box work with msahci. I have hacked the registry to disable the other drivers and forced Windows to load/use msahci. Part way through the boot, the machine blue screens and immediately reboots before I can catch even a tiny amount of the error message. Changing the BIOS between RAID and AUTO makes no difference. I tried enabling boot logging but no log is created -- I guess it crashes when loading the drivers necessary to write the log.
So, in RAID mode, I can load iaStor or iaStorV. In AUTO mode I can load pciide. But msahci (which is the one I really think I want) will not load in either mode.
Any thoughts or suggestions appreciated.
1. I wanted to perform a secure erase and after much grief, I managed that ;-)
2. I wanted to fix the alignment and after much more grief I managed that too. Great, I thought, I'll image that sucker. When I later restored that image I found that Paragon had undone my alignment. Sigh. So, I've developed a solution for that!
3. I wanted to use the optimum driver. The system is a Dell XPS 420 and I am not using RAID. The BIOS only provides for AUTO or RAID selections (no straight AHCI option).
By messing with the Registry, I've been able to boot Win 7 with the following drivers:
* pciide
* iaStorV
* iaStor (latest from Intel)
iaStorv gave the best performance but it doesn't support TRIM (as I understand it). The latest iaStor is supposed to support TRIM but it was significantly slower on simple reads (iaStorV: 247MB/s versus iaStor:186MB/s.
What I have not been able to do is make this darn box work with msahci. I have hacked the registry to disable the other drivers and forced Windows to load/use msahci. Part way through the boot, the machine blue screens and immediately reboots before I can catch even a tiny amount of the error message. Changing the BIOS between RAID and AUTO makes no difference. I tried enabling boot logging but no log is created -- I guess it crashes when loading the drivers necessary to write the log.
So, in RAID mode, I can load iaStor or iaStorV. In AUTO mode I can load pciide. But msahci (which is the one I really think I want) will not load in either mode.
Any thoughts or suggestions appreciated.
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