GA-990FXA-UD5 with SSD drive (primary) and 2 HHD (RAID 1)

[teufelhund]

Hi,

I have a BIOS setting question for a new install of Win 7 64bit.  

I'm looking at the GA-990FXA-UD5 to replace a Foxconn Destroyer board.  I have a new 240GB OCZ Agility 3 SSD that I plan to use as the primary that will replace the primary HDD.  I will also have two 1TB WD (SATA 2) drives in RAID 1 configuration that will be added after the Win 7 install.

When setting the BIOS for the OnChip SATA Type, I'm assuming I should set it initially to RAID (and not ACHI) for the Win 7 install, then install the AMD SB950 RAID/ACHI driver as shown in the user's manual?

I was looking at the GA-990FXA-UD5 Living Review thread by 'absic' and it appears the Microsoft ACHI driver may be better than the AMD driver?

This is my first use of an SSD and just want to make sure it's right.  

Planned system specs:

GA-990FXA-UD5
AMD Phenom II 955 Black edition
Corsair H50 cooler
CORSAIR Vengeance 16GB (CMZ16GX3M4A1600C9)
OCZ Agility 3 240GB
2x 1TB WD Caviar Black SATA 2 (RAID 1)
2x eVGA 9800 GTX+ in SLI
LG Blu-Ray burner
Silverstone DA800
Corair Obsidian Series 800D case

Thanks!

[Dark Mantis]

Hi and welcome.

It sounds like you will have a very nice system there when you have finished. I would suggest just installing the SD on the SATA3-0 port and in RAID mode. This will cover it later for AHCI when you add the two drives in RAID mode. Setup Windows on the SSD and then load all the drivers etc. When finished you can add the other drives in a RAID1 array on the same controller as the SSD. The optical drive you can mount on a seperate controller and as IDE mode.

[absic]

Hi there,

when I wrote the article and did the initial tests the Native Microsoft AHCI driver did out perform the AMD AHCI drivers. I'm not sure if this will still be the case as AMD have released new versions of the AHCI Drivers 12.1 and these may now be better, but as I no longer run the GA-990FXA-UD5 on a daily basis I am not in a position to test it for you. Sorry. 

[teufelhund]

Thanks for your input!  

Ordered the board this morning.  It may take a few weeks, but I will benchmark speeds with both the Microsoft and AMD drivers using CrystalDiskMark and BootRacer and post them in the living review.

[absic]

If you are going to benchmark the SSD I would recommend that you use ATTO (download it from here: http://www.attotech.com/products/product.php?sku=Disk_Benchmark ) rather then CrystalDiskMark.

[autotech]

AMD has greatly improved there AHCI drivers i am using them now on my SSD. It is hooked on that board to the first sata port and i had mine in AHCI during install but i use only one spare hard drive i do have a raid setup in the same computer but they are unplugged so if my SSD takes a dive i just plug and play with a few bios changes.

With ATTO benchmark i am just a few off on the write it says 500 i do 493 so it is very close the winner is the read speed. Advertised as 550 and i do 585 so is better than what they say.

Google SSD set up in windows 7 there are alot of good articles out there.

http://forum.corsair.com/forums/showthread.php?t=82516

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?63273-*-Windows-7-Ultimate-Tweaks-Utilities-*&p=442151&viewfull=1

Those are two of the ones i used to set it up.

[teufelhund]

Thanks again for all the help and information! 

I really appreciate it.

[autotech]

No problem just wish i could of afforded a 240 gig SSD instead of a 90 gig but im happy with it actually im really careful with it most games arent installed just 3 of them and i gave up alot of programs but i still have 45.4 left free of 83.7 so a little over half but the speed is worth it, This is my first SSD and i would of bought bigger but was worried it wouldnt be as good as people said mainly i always used raid0 on 2 x 500 gig platter drives. Used about 200 gigs of space on it so with a 240 i still couldnt install all i wanted to but alot more than i have now.

A good trick i learned is to install programs to my spare hard drive just dont do it alot because i mainly have alot of games and i like the performance of the SSD.

[teufelhund]

Well, got the OS installed.  I used the AMD RAID driver per the manual, version 3.31540.13 3/14/2011.  The results I got from ATTO aren't what I expected.  With an Agility 3 SSD running SATA III shouldn't the transfer rates be much higher?   I tried to different SATA III cables and made sure I had SATA3.0 Support enabled in the BIOS.   The firmware on the Agility is the most current.  

I thought it would have been in the high 400's but it looks like it is running at SATA II speeds.  Or am I misreading the results or running the wrong test?

I attachted a screen shot of the benchmark.

Thanks for any suggestions.

[absic]

Have you tried the latest drivers from AMD?

Download from here: http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/windows/Pages/raid_windows.aspx and see if they work better

[teufelhund]

updated the driver, but unfortuantely that did not change anything.  I checked the driver on the SSD drive through Device Manager, could this be the problem?

[the_Willard]

I'm quite interested to see what the solution is here as well.  I'm having the exact same problem with a Corsair Force 3 SSD.  I've got the the SSD (as a single disk) and two HDDs in a RAID 0 array on the AMD southbridge with SATA 3.0 enabled in the BIOS and the best read/write speeds I'm getting in the ATTO benchmark are around 240 MB/s, less than half what they should be.  It's showing up the same way too, it will hit a wall right around the 64k mark.

Between the Etron USB 3.0 issues  (which resulted in me having to buy a new external enclosure for my HDD as I hear enclosures using the Asmedia chip, rather than the JMicron, should work without issue on the Etron controller) and now this SSD headache I keep expecting this motherboard to climb out of the case and kick me in the nuts just to prove how much it hates me...

EDIT:  I think I found it.  Do you have RAID 5 support disabled in your BIOS?  I did, since I had no plans to ever use RAID 5, and found a thread on here talking about that impacting drive speeds.  So I went in to my BIOS, enabled RAID 5 and voila!  ATTO benchmark speeds in the 400MB/s range.  This is a really odd quirk but I'll take it.

[teufelhund]

EDIT:  I think I found it.  Do you have RAID 5 support disabled in your BIOS?  I did, since I had no plans to ever use RAID 5, and found a thread on here talking about that impacting drive speeds.  So I went in to my BIOS, enabled RAID 5 and voila!  ATTO benchmark speeds in the 400MB/s range.  This is a really odd quirk but I'll take it.

Not think....BUT DID! Good job on finding that post!  That is bizzaro.  Like you, I never set the RAID 5 to enable.  Never thought I'd have to enable something that was not needed.  Guess it is needed if you want to SATA III.  The speeds are not as high as I thought they would be, but at this point I'm not going to aurgue.  I can tweak around with drivers if the spirit moves me.

Anyway, thanks to everyone that assisted!  I'll update my post over on the OCZ forums and my post regarding the compatibility of the SSD drive with this board and make note of the BIOS setting.