HDD seems a little slower in new E6600+P5B

[Sou| Colossus]

Just got my E6600 + Asus P5B vanilla + 2gb Corsair DDR2-800, but ever since I installed Windows, the HDD access has seemed a bit slow.

It's as though the drive has to go through a lot of work to get data whereas it took less time when the same drive was in my 3.0 Northwood. It might just be me, but one thing I noticed is the grey loading bar at the bottom of the screen right before the XP boot screen (the same bar you always see with Win2k). I've never noticed this except on slow computers--on my Northwood it zipped passed this and flew through the loading screen, as well. The whole time the HDD is just thrashing, and this is on a fresh Windows partition.

I don't think there's anything wrong with my BIOS settings, everything that has to do with SATA is defaulted and the drive is in SATA1, the first port. Anyone with the same board have any comments?

[Brahmzy]

I single drive scenerios on the P5B D, you want to use the ICH8R Intel Matrix SATA controller and enable AHCI in the BIOS for the SATA HDD(s). Upon Windows install, hit F6 and load the Intel AHCI Desktop SATA driver.

It makes a HUGE difference from "IDE" mode.

[Sou| Colossus]

What about the non-Deluxe, and what if I already installed Windows without hitting F6?

[patate]

For the P5B use the JMicron RAID sata port ( the one thats separated from the four others). What I would recommend you do is install the JMicron RAID / AHCI driver from the P5B cd, shutdown, connect your drive to the JMicron SATA RAID port and then try and boot windows. Make sure the JMicron RAID port is using AHCI in the bios ( i think its in the onboard devices config, but im not sure).

If this doesnt work you should be able to switch it back to a regular SATA port so that windows can boot properly again.

And yes performance is A LOT better. Sped up my boot time quite a bit also.

cheers

[Sou| Colossus]

Yeah I'm on the JMicron controller with AHCI, the performance "improvement" is actually normal for SATA drives. It looks like there isn't even a driver for Intel's SATA controller when in AHCI mode, at least not on ASUS' disc/site or on Intel's website. When I enable Intel controller in AHCI mode, it just sits in Device Manager as an unknown PCI device with no driver in sight.

[Brahmzy]

There IS a driver for ICH8R AHCI man. Download it from Intel's chipset section. It is in their "F6Floppy" download.

[Sou| Colossus]

ICH8R. If you notice, the P5B non-Deluxe uses the ICH8 for which the ICH8R driver does not work.

In ASUS' infinite wisdom, they included the ICH8R driver on their disc but decided to label it ICH8. When I attempt to use this via the F6 method in the XP install, it seems fine and dandy until you attempt to boot up in AHCI mode and alas it doesn't work because it's the wrong fucking driver. If the AHCI SATA controller appears in Device Manager now as Unknown PCI Device, I should be able to just install it off of the CD in Windows as well but it doesn't work because the correct driver simply isn't included.

[Brahmzy]

Doh! I thought we were talkin' 'bout the P5B D. Sorry.

[Skids1]

I am/was having the very same problem with my P5B WiFi/D... I installed the Jamicron drivers in windows, then shut down and I switched my Raptor off of Sata 1 to Sata 5, then made sure it was set to AHCI. Also before on SATA1 this drive PC was VERY sluggish to the point where i had to hit F5 after i deleted a file in My Documents to see that it disappeared.