Question about z68 boards and SATA III drives, in particular high speed SSD

[mpetroul]

Hello all thanks for looking this post.

I have been having and issue with my SSD, a corsair force GT. It seems to drop to SATA II performance numbers and is noted in the Intel software as being SATA II drive. I am just wondering if there is anyone out there that has a Z68 board and in particular I have a Z68X-UD7. I

I have done a secure erase, as I was told by the corsair forum mod, several clean installs I have tried like 6 different cables and put the drive by itself on each of my SATA III ports and had it with another SATA III drive by Crucial which works fine. They are on port 0 and 1 of my intel controller chip right now and one is working at about 400mb/sec and the other 160-180mb/sec.

If there is anyone out there that has a similar system and has had good luck with the Corsair drives, please let me know what you have done to get that performance going.

Thanks very much!
Mike

Here is what I have installed on my system.

Intel 2600K
GA-Z68x-UD7
16gb Corsair dominator memory
2X MSI 6950 2gb in X-fire
750 watt corsair power supply

Corsiair Force GT SSD
Crucual M4 SSD
WD 1 TB caviar black
 

[Dark Mantis]

Hi

Have you installed the Intel Rapid Storage Drivers ?

I take it that it is configured as AHCI mode ?

Have you made sure that the firmware is the latest on your drive ?

Make sure that Windows Write cache buffer flushing is turned off.

[mpetroul]

I have tried each of the SATA III SSD's on each of the controller chips I have. Each controller is set to AHCI and/or RAID. I have tried the PCH in RAID and AHCI modes. Neither one gives me any difference.

I have the IRST driver 10.6 installed now, I have tried the 10.50 also.
If I use the drive as a boot drive, it comes up in the IRST software as 3gb/sec
If I use another drive as a boot drive, it comes up as 6gb/sec, then when I try to access it or run a bench mark, I can actually see it drop out to 3gb/sec in the software.

Could that be an issue with the board or with the drive itself? I dont seem to have any issues with my other drives, they get to the advertised speeds for the most part.

I have talked to tech support and they said to RMA it, when I spoke with the RMA people they said okay, then when I asked for an RMA number I never heard from them again. That was about July 4th. I thought it was just because of the holiday and I gave them time to get back to me but no one ever has, and now I am just having more issues the more I try to use this board.

Any help you could offer would be great.
Thanks,
Mike

[Kingboyk]

I had a Corsair Force 3 120GB in my Gigabyte Z68 build. The thing really flew, <10 seconds bootup and 7.9 on the Windows Experience Index. I had connect it to a SATA 3 port and use AHCI but it sounds like you're already doing that. There were no issues with it in terms of speed and I could certainly tell all was well... Not sure that helps a great deal other than to tell you "it should work".

(Unfortunately I had to RMA the drive as I started to get blue screens. I think it's not Corsair's fault but there seems to be some issue with Sandy Bridge and the latest Sandforce chipset. I've moved to an Intel 510, so far so good).

[mpetroul]

Thanks for the reply, I wll keep the sandforce and Sandy bridge thing in mind. It makes sense that intel would make sure that their SSD's work well with their chipset, especially with the ssd caching utilities. Maybe I should try one of those drives out. Thanks very much!
Mike

[Dark Mantis]

Quite often with these SSDs the problem is with the firmware they are released with. Try checking to see if yours has the latest firmware installed.