Problem with SATA III ports on Z68MA-D2H-B3

[rosswf]

Hi, would be very grateful for some advice on this.

Trying to use a Corsair Force 3 SATA III SSD and a Hitachi 2TB SATA III HDD on this mobo. I've done several rebuilds, with the mobo BIOS set to ACHI on some and IDE on others. I don't have Rapid Storage enabled and am not loading any of the drivers for that.

None of the builds allow me to use the SATA III ports - Windows simply fails to load with a "Cannot read from disk" error after POST (or words to that effect).

I can use the drives fine on the SATA II ports. All chipset drivers are installed (I'm running Win 7 x64).

I tried loading the ACHI drivers supplied by Gigabyte from a USB stick during Windows setup but had an error message saying they're unsigned.

Thinking of RMAing this board as I've run out of ideas.  

[Dark Mantis]

Hi

Try downloading and installing the IRST drivers from Intel's site. These are far better than the older versions. If it still fails I would suggest that you have got something wrong there and we would need to go through the build.

[rosswf]

Thanks - but I'm not looking to run Rapid Storage, just to have the OS and apps loaded on the SSD in AHCI mode. So I don't think that would help, would it?

[bugtraq69]

Yeah. I had the same trouble. I don't have the SSD, just the Hitachi 2TB SATIII drive, and I couldn't get past the Windows Installer complaining about the fact that it couldn't find a driver when set to AHCI mode. IDE works fine though so I went with that. From what I've read, unless you need hot-swap, there's little runtime difference between AHCI and IDE, but I'm not an expert.

One thing I have noticed is that the 5400rpm Hitachi is a LOT slower than my aging 7200rpm 1TB Samsung. I'm currently booting from the Hitachi, but rapidly coming to the conclusion that (in the absence of an SSD) I need to swap back to the Samsung. The strange thing is that HDTach regularly returns data transfers speeds of ~130MB, but during my last restore of >65GB of .mp3's and videos, and I saw a drop to sustained ~30-40MB. Windows Explorer is positively glacial on this drive as well. I appreciate the drop in spin speed has a cost - I just didn't expect it to be quite so noticeable on bog standard file copies between drives.

My lad has inherited last years i7-920/GA-X58A-UD3R and really flies OC'd at 4GHz. I expected my i5-2500K SNB to be faster still. It feels like swimming through treacle 

regards
peat 

[Dark Mantis]

Hi the IRST includes the AHCI drivers too.

There is quite a performance boost from swapping to AHCI mode as oppopsed to IDE mode, apart from the hot swap capabilities and NCQ.

Many of these slower , often referred to as "green drives", are not very good performance wise at all and not just to do with the slower spin speed. Of course your problem with such a slow transfer rate could be simply because of the type of files being copied or because the files were fragmented badly.