So you wanna buy a SSD? Read this first.

[stoanee]

Excellent! Keep us informed!

I am one of the reluctant late adopters, someday I will take the plunge.

[Delavan]

Before I begin, please do NOT take all this as gospel (I am not God and have more than "feet of clay")

Yes you are.

[sswilson]

About time you got off your butt and did this.... ;) (JK, we really did need something along these lines.).

Couple of points for you to consider....

To get your system into AHCI mode you need to enter your BIOS and change it from IDE mode to AHCI mode. It may also be labeled as "RAID" mode. This will vary from motherboard to motherboard. Consult your manual for more information.

Might want to mention that it's a PITA to switch over after the OS is installed, and that it's best to set AHCI in bios prior to OS installation.

As far as Trim + AMD goes.... I noticed you mentioned Trim & ITGC, but didn't mention the proprietary stand-alone cleaners (like intel's toolbox). From personal experience I can verify that the intel toolbox does not work on AMD chipsets set to AHCI. Best guess is that it sees all drives under AMD AHCI drivers as being in Raid config.

Once again... thanks for the great write-up!

[Hunt]

Thanks for the great writeup. All these AMD & trim issues make me want to jump ship to Intel though. I wish AMD would support the 790FX + 750SB.

I guess it is saving me money though since I won't buy another SSD until I can get it to run properly.

[Modus]

thanks for this tutorial! did majority of the things you've mentioned. helped out alot.

[BootlegUsher]

Originally Posted by AkG

Thanks guys. It is a work in progress and based on members feedback I hope it will grow into a GREAT resource for first time SSD buyers.

BootLegUsher....sorry but you are screwed. AMD only added TRIM support to their 8 series SouthBridge...so your 7 series will NOT pass on TRIM. You will have to rely on "ITGC".
I'll update the original post now with more information. So you and other peeps will know where I am coming from WRT "TRIM" :)

Just for my information, if I had a 8 series chipset, where would I get an AMD AHCI driver?

EDIT: Just saw your updated post, thanks for the info.

[terrybear]

you left out that trim IS supported in intel raid configurations while unfortunatly its not supported in raid on the current amd 8xx southbridges atm. GJ otherwise :)

[AkG]

Sorry but nope (or at least to the best of my knowledge...I could be wrong). No TRIM with RAID right now. For a VERY short while the first TRIM enabled Intel RST drivers did INCORRECTLY state (in the notes) that TRIM would be passed on to the SSDs even if they were in a RAID config. What the engineers meant was that in setup where you have a SINGLE SSD while having raid'ed HDDS (all on the ICH) the single SSD would still get the TRIM command passed to it. That actually is good to know as MANY workstations (ie one of Intel's BIG customers of SSDs) have raid'ed HDDs for storage and a singel SSD for the OS and up until then the RST drivers would not pass on the TRIM command even though the SSD was not in the RAID array. BUT the moment you stick two or more SSDs into a RAID config you lose TRIM.

In the future...maybe...hell probably. But that is the future and only time will tell who gets RAID + TRIM working. :)

[BootlegUsher]

Here's one more question, since it looks like the new SSDs that are coming out are SATA III, how much performance will be lost if I have SATA II on my motherboard? I read the part about the 4K speeds being very important, will these new SSD's saturate SATA II on the 4K, or is it for something else?

Sorry if that question is unclear, my SSD knowledge is poor.

[lowfat]

Random read/write it good, but only to a point. Almost all modern SSD's do well in the small file random read/write department.

Now as for your actual question, yes small file random read/write performance will likely drop if you were to use a SATA 6Gbps drive on a SATA 3Gbps controller. If you look at the Crucial C300 reviews you will see this.