ASUS Sabertooth X79 sata port/SSD confusion

[jjkrogs]

So I completed my first ever build today and everything is working well-- except for my SSD, which is benchmarking far slower than it should. I don't want to bother posting the numbers so please take my word for it, but they are half what they should be...

It's a Samsung 840 Pro hooked to an ASUS Sabertooth X79 6gb Marvell port used for the "SSD caching" function. I keep reading how Intel ports are better, but the motherboard manual specifically suggests that I should use the 2 SSD caching Marvell ports even if I'm just using my data drives in regular mode.

It should be noted that I cloned my old SSD with Samsung's migration software, but both my new bios is set to AHCI and I've confirmed via the registry method that I am in fact running in that mode. I'd imagine if it wasn't running in AHCI before the hardware switch, it wouldn't work in AHCI mode now.

What's weird though is that in my Windows 7 device manager under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers there are only the following 3 entries:

Asmedia 106x SATA controller
ATA Channel 0
ATA Channel 1

Shouldn't there be something here that has "AHCI" listed? I've checked the drivers page and thought I downloaded everything...

What the heck's going on here?

 

[smorizio]

make sure your running the newest driver. i have a sabertooth mb has the same 3 party sata. there made for data hard drives or a raid set up.

 

[jjkrogs]

I went to ASUS's site at the Sabertooth X79 download page, chose Win 7 64bit and went to the SATA menu. I am unable to install the top driver as halfway through the install it tells me that it's not compatible, so I try the next one down and can do it just fine.

http://support.asus.com/download.aspx?SLanguage=en&p=1&m=SABERTOOTH+X79

I've also downloaded the Marvell 6gb controller listed here about halfway down (version xx.1014) as I assume that is needed in addition to the others? Anyway, I'm fairly sure I have everything I need regarding drivers, or it wouldn't work at all.

What else could cause it? I've been to the SSD tweaker section here at Toms Hardware and these are little things-- something BIG is missing here.

Any input regarding the SATA ports I mentioned above?