AMD chipset AHCI drivers prevent boot on SSD?

[sswilson]

Originally Posted by AkG

Nope.

Its not that the OS is TRIM aware that is the issue. Its the fact that the drivers wont pass on the trim command to the SSD. As far as I know, the official AMD drivers do NOT support TRIM. This means you will have to run the MSAHCI drivers or risk getting into a degraded state. There are ways around this with Intel SSDs. Use the AMD drivers (which are faster) and use the Intel SSD Toolbox to setup a manual SSD optimizer to run once a week (or every couple days). That will send a manual TRIM command that bypasses the drivers so that even in IDE mode the SSD will stay nice and fast. For Indilinx users....use wiper.exe (or just rely on the kick ass ITGC built into them). For Toshiba and JM owners...rely on their ITGC. Its good and as long as you let it idle every once in awhile you will be golden.

NOW with all that being said.....think long and hard before you buy a SandForce based drive right now if you are using AMD. MS ACHI drivers are not completely t13 complaint so while they do send the trim command....they overload the SF controller (they send it in a continuous stream, where they should only send 64 entries at a time IIRC) and you can, under extreme circumstances, end up with a degrade drive even running in AHCI mode. Only the Intel one works 100% "correctly" with SF drives as they are the only ones completely complaint with the new std.

Unfortunately, if you try and rely on the SF drives self-maintenance routines....you are going to be sad as they DO get into a degraded state and do make the Intel SSD's routines look aggressive in comparison. Words like "extremely mild" and "less then optimal" are almost being too forgiving. Trust me on this. Testing them and getting best results possible is very difficult and time consuming. AND it doesn't matter what brand you buy. Corsair F100, Vertex 2 (), Phoenix () or Inferno () they all do it the same "mild" and slow way.

In a round-about way, the current issues with the SandForce SSDs might be a good thing in the long run. With any luck it'll force AMD to get off their rear ends and fix the pass-through of Trim Commands in their AHCI drivers. (or is it bigger than that?).