vertex3 not nearly as snappy as vertex2?

[zCypher]

I just installed a 120gb vertex3 in the following system

AMD Phenom II X4 3.1GHz
Biostar A8800G+
4GB Gskill

The only thing installed so far are the usual firefox, winamp, MSE, etc. Just finished installing everything. Upon a fresh boot with no excessive bootup (no updates already all done), cold starting firefox takes a really long time (like 10 seconds). It's at least as long as it took when the system just had a 500GB WD Black (which is now the secondary drive).

My own system has a vertex2 60gb with

E5200 2.5GHz
MSI G31M3-L V2 ($40 motherboard when I built the system 2 years ago)
4GB corsair something or other

When i start up my system, I click firefox, outlook, update MSE, open winamp all simultaneously and firefox opens within ~2-3 at the most. My system is fairly low end compared to the average anandtecher I think. Why would the other one with vertex3 be so much slower? I did everything exactly the same (did not toggle any settings pre or post-install for my ssd and both computers running 7 ultimate 64 bit).

Is it just an AMD vs Intel thing?
Motherboard chipset drivers?

It's too big of a difference to write off to my mind playing tricks on me. Could it be the vertex3 playing backwards compatible to sata2 doesn't like it? I have no idea.

 

[Spikesoldier]

maybe install amd ahci drivers and make sure you are in ahci mode in bios.

 

[zCypher]

maybe install amd ahci drivers and make sure you are in ahci mode in bios.

There's a thread saying the AMD AHCI drivers are no good, but I wouldn't really know personally. How do I check which one is in use? In the device manager, or is this a BIOS only thing?

hmmmm, downloaded it from the AMD site but it just lists all the other stuff in the installer, doesn't mention AHCI

 

[zCypher]

enabling AHCI in the bios + installing the driver worked
had to reinstall windows but oh well. now it seems faster than mine, so all is well.

 

[(sic)Klown12]

There's a thread saying the AMD AHCI drivers are no good, but I wouldn't really know personally. How do I check which one is in use? In the device manager, or is this a BIOS only thing?

hmmmm, downloaded it from the AMD site but it just lists all the other stuff in the installer, doesn't mention AHCI

I have better luck with AMD's AHCI drivers compared to Microsoft's, but other's haven't so it might just be a crap-shoot.

To tell which you're using, open up Device Manager, go to "IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers" and expand the list. If you're using the built in Microsoft driver, it's show up a a generic controller. If you're using AMD's, it'll read as a "AMD SATA Controller".

Here's the link to the AMD AHCI driver:
http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/raid_windows.aspx

While there are separate downloads for Vista and Windows 7, the file is exactly the same.