Weird SATA AHCI Issue on Intel Chipset 6

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OldM3ta

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jun 6, 2004
Messages
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My gear:
Gigabyte P67 motherboard - GA-P67A-UD3
Corsair 64GB SSD C300 SATA 3 - connected to SATA 3 Port
Seagate 1TB HDD ST31000 SATA 2 - connected to SATA 3 Port

So I installed Windows 7 but I had the bios set to treat SATA as IDE.
This caused no AHCI driver to install in Windows.
I set up my hard drives and all seemed fine, but then when I looked in my bios, I remembered about AHCI.
I used the steps found here http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976 to get AHCI installed, and I rebooted my machine, changed the bios to AHCI, and Windows ran just fine.

Except then I started noticing major issues with file transfers between my SSD and HDD. Usually, I was getting around 70MB/s consistent, with Max Throughput around 150MB/s when transferring a collection of files aroun 8GB-20GB from SSD to HDD. The moment after I switched to AHCI, my Max Throughput jumped to nearly 300MB/s, but then the average and continual stream quickly shot down to as low as 6MB/s. The rate drops from a high number (150MB-300MB/s) to a very low number very fast making the transfer of a large group of files take forever!

I grabbed the auto_infl.exe Intel chipset 6 drivers and it upgraded my stock window ahci drivers to the Intel 6 ones for AHCI, but the low transfer speed problem still occurred. I defragged the HDD and the problem still existed.

I switched back my bios setting to IDE, and the transfer speeds are now once again averaging 70-80MB/s. Anyone know what's the deal?! Did I miss something about AHCI? Isn't it supposed to be faster and better?
 
notarat said:
So you have a P67 and SATA performance issues? Hmm..Odd...
Click to expand...

Yes, I see what you are getting at. However, they said that the problem with their SATA was on the SATA 2 3Gb/s ports. I'm not using those. Wondering if I did something wrong in my AHCI issues.
 
I have just experienced similar behaviour.

I have a P6T with two internal Samsung HD204UI's and one more in a USB 3 caddy. I installed Windows 7 in IDE mode and was getting consistent 100-120 read write speeds between these drives. A few weeks ago I used the same KB article to switch to AHCI. This morning I noticed my transfer rate from the USB drive to the internal drives was only 50 MBps.

Further investigation found that the USB drive was able to sustain 100-120 read and write rates. However, the internal HD204UI's were only able to hit the same read rate. Write speeds were only reaching 50 MBps when copying multiple uncompressed DVD ISO's (so about 6 GB per file). HD Tune's write benchmark did not get above 5 MBps.

Switching back to IDE mode and all drives are able to sustain 100-120 read and write rates.

Any ideas?
 
I wish I had something to offer. I've had to leave my configuration in IDE mode without AHCI since I transfer heavily between my two hard drives (both on the USB 3.0 connectors of the board). I have high rate transfers with IDE on, and extremely slow transfers when AHCI on.
 
I've had to leave my configuration in IDE mode without AHCI
Click to expand...

This. I've never had AHCI be anything but a headache. If you really want that to work I'd try it from scratch.
 
SSD's esp intel's really need AHCI to thrive. AHCI is fine, it just depends on the implementation. The P45's were dodgy imo, sandy's P67 is much better imho, but not perfect. Mainly it's the bios detection, other than that and the recall issue, no problems.
 
Looking forward to giving that a try when the board issues get sorted and I get my hands on a SSD.
 
I have an SSD and can't run AHCI on my P67 platform without losing all speed in hard drive to hard drive transfers. Board is going back though. It was a POS anyways.
 
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