DS3, SATA II, bios question

[billyc]

My new build is up and running, but I don't think I have the bios right for the SATA II HD.

Right now I'm settin at:

1. SATA AHCI mode disabled
2. SATA Port 0-3 Native mode disabled
3. Onboard sata/ide device enabled
4. Onboard sata/ide control mode IDE

What are the proper settings? I don't think I'm 100% off, but real close. I also forgot to check to see if there was a 150 jumper on the seagate hd.

I read somewhere that if I enable AHCI, I will need a new driver to support it. What driver and where can I get it? Wouldn't it be on the MS install disk?

 

[Jizumonkey]

If you are running only a single drive your settings are fine.

Only alter the AHCI if your drive is capable, and also then you should format your OS too from what I've read. I got away with changing this setting and back again with no damage once but others have not been so lucky with file corruption.

You can toggle native mode safely as far as i've found without problems, but it made absolutely no difference to my drive speed in hdtach.

Leave settings 3 and 4, option 4 is only valid if you are running RAID anyway.

 

[billyc]

Thanks. It bugs me that I don't have things right. This is a Seagate Baricuda 7200.10 and does support AHCI. The only thing Seagate talks about was the NCQ function.

This first build has been a great learning experience.

 

[Jizumonkey]

I had the exact same questions when I put my new system together, it seemed easier to make a raid setup with the amount on information in the manual!

 

[billyc]

installing the sata II raid driver wouldn't require you to use the raid function, would it? You would get the sata performance function and the ability to use raid if desired. That's more of a question than a statement, but it makes sense.

 

[mikeny]

I second that! "First build is a learning expierence."


I have 2 SATA II's and my bios are what you described. Ive gotten replies that that is normal.

 

[billyc]

I now have a new problem relating to all this. My DVD writer won't write. I've tried my old Sony writer, new IDE connector, checked master/slave all with no solution. After much research, fretting etc, I have found what I think might be the solution. The DVD is controlled by Jmicron GBB36a controller, the topic I was reading related to a JMB363 controller, but I assume they are probably the same. The controller is a SCSI/Raid controller that apparently redefines the IDE device to a SCSI device with the intention of supporting an IDE/SATA raid setup. Doesn't do much for my DVD writer. The device manager does show my samsung as a SCSI cd device. The basic conclusion of that forum was:

Don't connect an optical drive to Primary on the JMicron controlled IDE-channel

I only have one IDE connection and I'm connected as master, nothing on the slave connector. Some folks had success by installing the newest version of the sataIIraid driver. I downloaded it but haven't figured out what files to put on a floppy for the F6 install. They all won't fit.

Maybe this problem is worth a new topic, ya think?

 

[mikeny]

lol. What are your specs of your system? Ive heard some DVD's having issues with Jmicron. My $29.99 x16 DVD-RW dual-layered litescribe had no issues ;-)


I hooked it up to the IDE port, I believe I placed it as "master" and that was all she wrote. I just recently took out my floppy lol. I remember the 5.25" disks woooow

 

[billyc]

MB Gigabyte ds3
cpu intel c2d e4300
hd seagate baracuda 7200.10 320gb sata 3.0 (2nd ready to go in)
DVD samsung sh-s182d
mem kingston 2gb ddr2 6700
floppy/cd rdr mitsumi
psu ocz gamer 600
cpu cooler arctic cooling 7 pro
gpu xfx 7900gs
keyboard logitec g15
monitor lga l204wt
os xp home

I don't think it's the dvd, because I replaced it with my Sony 810 and had the same results. It has to do with the JMicron controller. First build, I've never overclocked so me and bios and drivers aren't busom buddys yet lol, especially the ones that make me start over with reinstall. Apparently, this has been found on the jmb36x controllers.

 

[Yaemish]

I'm having settings problems too.

I have two Segate Sata2 300 Drives with perp storage. I have them plugged in to the standard ports and not the Jmicron and they are not raided. What do the settings need to be so that these things run faster? I am getting really slow throughput on them.

 

[billyc]

lol. What are your specs of your system? Ive heard some DVD's having issues with Jmicron. My $29.99 x16 DVD-RW dual-layered litescribe had no issues ;-)


I hooked it up to the IDE port, I believe I placed it as "master" and that was all she wrote. I just recently took out my floppy lol. I remember the 5.25" disks woooow

I have solved my problem, sorry for the late response, but I've been re-installing XP and all apps and, oh yes, playing with my new rig.

The Gigabyte came with a JRaid ver 1.14.0.0. After much research, I found that JMicron made a fix for "optical drive writes" somewhere in ver 1.17.x.x. To complicate things, gigabyte's 1.17.x.x online still had ver 1.14.0.0 in it. I dl'd the JMicron ver of the driver and F6 installed and life is good. The old ver also supported the DVD drive as a simulated SCSI device, which meant no DMA, which made it very sssssslllllllllooooooowwwwwww.

The best I can come up with on the SATA drive situation is that if the HD is capable, Intell's drivers will use the 3 gig, AHCI support etc. Now, my only known problem on my new rig is that the 2nd HD, ordered a little later than the rest of the stuff, was doa. Did a RMA with Newegg and waiting. UPS is going to take a full week to git it delivered to Newegg. Not that I'm hurting with my 320 gig, it's just that I'd like to be done with this build now. I've had all the fun I can stand with it.

I thought I had done my research pretty well, but the actual build showed me where I could have spent a little more time in some area's. It really was a learning experience. As soon as I get my 2nd HD, I get to jump in with my first OC!

 

[billyc]

I'm having settings problems too.

I have two Segate Sata2 300 Drives with perp storage. I have them plugged in to the standard ports and not the Jmicron and they are not raided. What do the settings need to be so that these things run faster? I am getting really slow throughput on them.

All I can tell you is what I have them set at, which was trial and error till I got them to work.

First off, you need to check to see if you have a jumper on your hd. If you do, it makes the sata II look like a sata I - 150gig instead of 300. Don't know how much that will affect performance, but it can't help, assuming your board supports sata II.

I have 4 sata definitions in bios and they are set at:

1. SATA AHCI Mode disabled
2. SATA Port 0-3 Native mode enabled
3. Onboard SATA/IDE Device enabled
4. Onboard SATA/IDE ctrl mode IDE

When conversing with gigabyte on my problem, they only meantioned to set the ctrl mode to IDE. As meantioned earlier in this topic, you probably want to make sure you have a JMicron sata/raid controller driver ver of 1.17.x.x, get it from JMicron, gigabyte doesn't have the current version. This ver is needed for IDE support of an optical drive, I believe.

Hope it helps. Good Luck.

 

[Yaemish]

I don't have the jumpers on so it should go as a Sata2. I had AHCI on and was running in native mode; native mode made it way slower. I haven't tried turning AHCI off yet and turning on native mode.

Why do I want AHCI off? Should I be on the intel ports or the Jmicron?

 

[zjohnr]

Why do I want AHCI off? Should I be on the intel ports or the Jmicron?

Actually, it seems to me that the setting at the top of DS3 BIOS menu for SATA AHCI Mode should not actually be present. My reasoning for this is that the DS3 uses the Intel ICH8 southbridge, not the ICH8R and only the ICH8R is supposed to provide support for AHCI and RAID. So having the ability to supposedly turn on AHCI for the ICH8 does not make a lot of sense.

I have no idea what difference SATA Port 0-3 Native mode might make, but perhaps it is another BIOS option that really only has meaning when you've got an ICH8R southbridge. But I figure it shouldn't hurt to set it to enabled so I do.

I don't really have an opinion right now about whether to prefer using the Intel SATA ports or not. I'm using them at the moment on my rev 3.3 DS3 because I don't want to introduce any conflicts for my optical drive which is connected to the JMicron PATA port.

Yet even doing that, I still somehow ended up with the CD drive access mode being set to PIO. :? 🙁 I went into the Win XP Device Manager and deleted the "IDE Channel" the CD was hung off and rebooted and this seemed to be enough to get it redetected as a UDMA-2 device. But I still don't know why it ended up in PIO mode in the first place. I certainly wasn't trying any of the RAID or SATA combinations that I had heard can cause problems. I had three hard drives hooked up to the Intel SATA ports and the single DVD-ROM/CD-RW hooked up to the JMicron PATA connector.

Weird and unexpected behavior. 🙁

-john, the ostensibly clueless redundant legacy-in-transition dinosaur

 

[billyc]

I don't have the jumpers on so it should go as a Sata2. I had AHCI on and was running in native mode; native mode made it way slower. I haven't tried turning AHCI off yet and turning on native mode.

Why do I want AHCI off? Should I be on the intel ports or the Jmicron?

From what I read, the Intel drivers will support whatever options are available on the HD. You can use whatever ports you want, Gigabyte Jmicron or the Intel, they all support the Sata II. If you want Raid, then you need to plug into the Gigabyte (purple) ports. IMO, I don't have a lot of trust in JMicron and I'm not using Raid so I chose the Intel ports.

All 4 settings are very confusing and there is very little info on the proper settings for a non raid configuration. Everything I know about it, I've learned in the last few days during my setup. All I can do is give you my interpretation of the 4 setting relating to non raid setup. There are a lot more experienced folks that would probably disagree with me. This is Intel connections and gigabyte mb specific.

1. SATA AHCI Mode - If enabled, you must have a supporting driver installed. I did have a Jraid driver originally, but it was an old ver and had an optical (IDE) bug in it. I reinstalled with newer ver using F6 method and reinstalled windows, grudingly, but it fixed my optical drive write problem.

2. SATA port 0-3 Native mode - This can probably be switched on the fly, but I have not heard of anyone seeing any performance changes with it. It might depend on the HD manufacturer.

3. Onboard sata/ide device - It made sense to me to enable and I've never changed the setting.

4. Onboard sata.ide ctrl mode - I think this has mostly to do with raid. May not make a difference but I set it to IDE since that is how my HD's are running.

I hope someone a little more knowlegeable can correct me or verify my findings. I'm up and running and running stock right now. PCPitstop measured me as one of fastest rigs in my class, so I don't plan on changing anything, except a little OC'ing when my 2nd HD gets here.

I hope this helps. Good Luck.

 

[Yaemish]

I turned off AHCI and went to native mode. The drives go a little faster but when I run Sandra to benchmark, they are only doing Sata 150 instead of 300. Any drivers you guys think need to be changed? What should th ebest version be?

 

[zjohnr]

1. SATA AHCI Mode

Strangely enough, if you look at the rev 3.3 DS3's owner's manual, this BIOS setting is not even included/shown. The discussion about the BIOS options available on the Integrated Peripherals menu simply starts with SATA port 0-3 in my DS3 user's manual.

If I enable this setting, then during the POST process the following additional messages appear
Serial ATA AHCI BIOS, Version iSrc 1.07 08042006
Copyright (c) 2003-2006 Intel Corporation
** This version supports only Hard Disks and CDROM drives. **
Please wait. This will take few seconds.
The AHCI BIOS then detects and list the hard drives attached to my Intel SATA ports and boots windows. Windows then tries to start but takes a "blue screen" error that immediately triggers a reboot. Most likely the error when starting windows stems from my not having installed the Intel AHCI driver. I've read that you can "trick" Windows into installing this driver, but don't know if doing so really accomplishes anything useful.

As I said before, I'm not sure this option is really supposed to be available on a DS3/S3. You certainly don't seem to be able to do anything useful with it. About the only thing I'm sure of is that this BIOS option concerns the AHCI for the Intel SATA ports. The Gigabyte/JMicron ports have separate BIOS settings (see below).

2. SATA port 0-3 Native mode

This setting seems to pertain only to the four Intel ICH8 SATA ports. The best guess I've been able to come up with about what "Legacy IDE Mode" and "Native IDE Mode" may refer to is what is talked about in this Microsoft article: BIOS Settings for Native-Mode-Capable ATA Controllers. I only glanced at the article, but perhaps the reason changing the setting seems to have no effect is because Windows XP may switch the controller from Legacy IDE mode to Native mode. :? Or I could also be totally off in the wrong direction here ...

3. Onboard SATA/IDE Device
4. Onboard SATA/IDE Ctrl Mode

The user's manual pretty clearly states that these settings for the "Onboard SATA/IDE" only affect the Gigabyte/JMicron controller. You can also verify this by looking at how the Standard CMOS Features BIOS menu changes. When Onboard SATA/IDE Device is Enabled, the following six entries appear in the Standard CMOS Features BIOS menu.
IDE Channel 0 Master
IDE Channel 1 Master
IDE Channel 2 Master
IDE Channel 3 Master
IDE Channel 4 Master
IDE Channel 4 Slave
IDE Channel 5 Master
IDE Channel 5 SlaveWhen Onboard SATA/IDE Device is Disabled, all you get are the following four entries corresponding to the four Intel SATA ports.
IDE Channel 0 Master
IDE Channel 1 Master
IDE Channel 2 Master
IDE Channel 3 Master
-john

 

[zjohnr]

I turned off AHCI and went to native mode.

Where did you turn off AHCI? Did you change the SATA AHCI Mode BIOS setting for the Intel SATA ports or the Onboard SATA/IDE Ctrl Mode setting for the Gigabyte/JMicron SATA ports? Mostly I'm just curious. I am surprised that you saw SATA300 with AHCI and only SATA150 without it ... but I'm not that surprised.

Whichever ports you're talking about ... Intel or JMicron ... I'd be curious to know what you get (without AHCI) on the "other" ports. SATA150 or SATA300?

-john

 

[billyc]

Now that you meantioned it, I had the exact same startup error and messages at one time when playing with these settings. It must have been the AHCI setting that I then disabled to correct.

The user's manual pretty clearly states that these settings for the "Onboard SATA/IDE" only affect the Gigabyte/JMicron controller. You can also verify this by looking at how the Standard CMOS Features BIOS menu changes. When Onboard SATA/IDE Device is Enabled, the following six entries appear in the Standard CMOS Features BIOS menu.

IDE Channel 0 Master
IDE Channel 1 Master
IDE Channel 2 Master
IDE Channel 3 Master
IDE Channel 4 Master
IDE Channel 4 Slave
IDE Channel 5 Master
IDE Channel 5 Slave
When Onboard SATA/IDE Device is Disabled, all you get are the following four entries corresponding to the four Intel SATA ports.

IDE Channel 0 Master
IDE Channel 1 Master
IDE Channel 2 Master
IDE Channel 3 Master

This is really interesting. My DVDW drive shows up on channel 4 Master, which verifies that ch 4 & 5 are the JMicron ports. If you installed your sata drives on the JMicron connections, they would have to show up as master on ch 4 & 5 and then you would need to make sure your cd had the jumper set to slave.

Most likely the error when starting windows stems from my not having installed the Intel AHCI driver. I've read that you can "trick" Windows into installing this driver, but don't know if doing so really accomplishes anything useful.

While I was trolling for answers across the web, I run onto someone having the same dvd write error problem I was. I told him about the Jmicron ver upgrade needed. He came back and said he found the upgrade and it was marked as "hot", not needing an F6 install. I think he was using an MSI mb and it did solve his problem.

Is it possible that AHCI is raid related only? The bios settings, I mean. I know I had to install a newer ver of JMicron sata/raid to fix my dvdw write problem. The funny thing is, my drive is now running with a standard MS driver using UDMA 5 and is walkin and talkin.

 

[Yaemish]

I turned off AHCI and went to native mode.

Where did you turn off AHCI? Did you change the SATA AHCI Mode BIOS setting for the Intel SATA ports or the Onboard SATA/IDE Ctrl Mode setting for the Gigabyte/JMicron SATA ports? Mostly I'm just curious. I am surprised that you saw SATA300 with AHCI and only SATA150 without it ... but I'm not that surprised.

Whichever ports you're talking about ... Intel or JMicron ... I'd be curious to know what you get (without AHCI) on the "other" ports. SATA150 or SATA300?

-john

The only way I am seeing that it is SATA150 is through a comparative benchmark; and that is me just basing it on the speed difference. Is there anything I can change in Windows to let the computer know it should operating at a faster speed?

 

[Yaemish]

More direct question... (This is in Vista 32)

How is everyone else's transfer speeds for disk to disk? My SATA300 to SATA300 never gets above 30 MB/sec for file transfers. This is with single large (700 mb +) files. Just curious as to if other people are seeing similar speeds.

Indexing is turned off on both drives and McAfee virus scanning is disabled for the tests.

 

[billyc]

I just ran a benchmark using HD Tach on my single Seagate 320 SAT II.

The results were:

Random acess 13.2ms
avg read 68.2 MB/s
Burst speed 237.3 MB/s

This matched almost exactly with other benchmarks on this drive using the same tool.

 

[Yaemish]

Mines a little slower than that

OS Drive ST3120811AS
Random access 17.2ms
Average Read 49.3 MB/s
Burst Speed 201.5 MB/s

Second Drive ST3250820AS
Random access 13.3ms
Average Read 68.9 MB/s
Burst Speed 214.6 MB/s

Both are Seagate Barracudas, different sizes but they are the same. The device manager shows them as ATA devices, should they say SATA? I also wonder if it may still be a Vista thing. I'll have to ghost my Vista install and try the same test under my XP image.

 

[billyc]

One thing that shows is that with that burst speed, you have to be running greater than 150. I haven't followed Vista very much, but I seem to remember reading that there were some performance hits. I don't know if that reflects on HD's or not, but it would be interesting to se XP to compare.

 

[zjohnr]

How is everyone else's transfer speeds for disk to disk? My SATA300 to SATA300 never gets above 30 MB/sec for file transfers.

How did you measure the drive-to-drive transfer speed? Is this a Vista thing? :?

I've got Win XP and I don't of any way to get a direct report of what the transfer speed was when I "move" a file from one drive to another. I suppose I could try to catch the time it took to do the move and then do the arithmetic ... but it would be so much nicer to have software do this for me. :roll:

-john, the ostensibly clueless redundant legacy-in-transition dinosaur