What's the best way to improve performance when AHCI is not supported?

[Ichinisan]

Trying to help someone with a junk small system that has extremely limited potential for hardware upgrades. Old AMD dual-core CPU, 3GB RAM, GeForce 6150se (nForce 430, I think?). The only expansion slot will be needed for a basic GPU (which must be low-profile).

Originally, came with WinVista 32-bit and a free Win7 upgrade, so it was upgraded to Win7 32-bit. More recently, Win7 64-bit was installed clean and upgraded to Win10 x64.

There's no option in the CMOS/BIOS Setup to enable SATA/AHCI mode. Device Manager refers to the drive as "SCSI." I installed the latest (still ancient) nForce 430 driver, but the system still feels incredibly slow and it just feels like the storage subsystem is bogging everything down.

Is there a low-cost RAM caching system that could make it feel more zippy? I'd like to allocate ~512MB RAM to caching. It seems like that could offer SSD-like performance if it intelligently caches the most frequently accessed HDD sectors.

 

[PliotronX]

NVIDIA isn't too great at making chipsets; I recall their southbridges having wonky drivers and that a lot of the time, using Microsoft generic drivers for the controller would be faster even though it didn't support NCQ (AHCI?). You might try looking into how to do this but it was mostly for solving freezing issues rather than general performance.

edit- try the "Special nForce RAID Driverpacks for Win7-10" driver pack (after setting a system restore point perhaps). The nForce 4 apparently flat doesn't do AHCI so there are only limited driver choices available. As for caching, try HDDTurbo (free) or PrimoCache ($30).

 

[XavierMace]

I don't see a 512MB cache doing anything worth while.

 

[Phynaz]

What is the disk queue depth in resource monitor when it feels slow?

 

[denis280]

Throw in a ssd

 

[VirtualLarry]

Throw in a ssd

This. I refurb'ed a rig with an NV system chipset, lacking AHCI, and put in a 120GB boot SSD, and upgraded from Win7 64-bit to Win10 64-bit. It had a GT740 GDDR5, and 8GB of DDR2.

Yes, those older AM2+ boards can take the cheap Chinese DDR2 4GB sticks. Those may be the best way to max out the RAM, on a reasonable budget.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Did the OP say there's no available PCI-E slot? None?!

 

[XavierMace]

He said the one slot will be used by a dGPU.

 

[xgsound]

I had an AMD X2 with a 6150/ 430 Mobo. I had to use the Microsoft disk drivers (force them if necessary) with an Intel 530 SSD and cheap DDR2 eBay upgrades with good results. I think I turned on raid. I'm not sure if other SSDs will cooperate with the Nvidia 430 chipset. The 530 works twice as good in the new rig so it wasn't wasted.
I've seen 240 GB Intel 530 and 1500Pro SSDs on eBay for $57.

Jim

 

[PliotronX]

Good point about the disk itself, if it has say the original spinner that came with the system, a lot of them at the time were Hitachi 160GB. Even that disk is slow by today's standards with only a few megs of cache, SATA1 possibly and a low areal density. A SSD would smooth it out regardless of controller. The only caveat is missing TRIM but overprovisioning can help keep performance up.

 

[xgsound]

I think the 6150SE came with the 410 chipset. My Mobo with the Intel SSD was a MSI K9NGM2 or MS-7252 with 430 chipset and AMI bios from (WOW) 7/06/2006. It now has a HDD in the basement. I don't remember if I used raid or only tried it. At any rate do NOT use Nvidia drivers of any kind. I tried many with bad results. I couldn't get 64 bit win7 on it so I upgraded for more memory support.
Just as a reminder: the SSD did 10X better than the HDD in the old AMD setup. The same SSD does 4x even better again in the newer I5 setup.

Jim

 

[VeryCharBroiled]

I had an AMD X2 with a 6150/ 430 Mobo. I think I turned on raid.
Jim

^^^
an old dell i had did not list ahci until i set the sata to "raid" in the bios, then it ran in ahci mode.

worth a shot.

but a ssd will run fine, trim and all, in straight ide mode (or whatever it is).