SSD Drive and locked out BIOS with permanent RAID.

[tcstech]

I have a Gateway LX6810-01 that has a locked down BIOS that does not allow you to change your SATA Mode from RAID to anything else (AHCI). I bought a Crucial M2 64GB SSD that I wanted to be able to use with AHCI and TRIM.

I have looked everywhere for a solution that wouldn't involve me having to change out the motherboard since I am worried that some of the cool media panel features this computer has would no longer function.

I came across this thread started here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/266600-32-ahci-important-warrant-buying-mobo

Mikey2 outlines a procedure he went through where he used a marvel controller using SATA III card and a similar SSD to mine to bypass his BIOS and enable AHCI and thus TRIM support by loading the latest firmware for that controller card.

I was wondering if any of you think this will work for me since my BIOS is permanently locked to RAID (Yes I have tried dumping the BIOS and tried tweaking the settings manually but chickened out when I saw others actually paperweight their motherboards.)

 

[tcstech]

I found out exactly what it was. I was at my local compusa ready to buy an Ultra SATA II controller when I said "Man this might not even work."
So I went back home and got to looking around, running benchmarks and the command to check if TRIM is working. Sure enough, TRIM is working and I thought to myself "how is this even possible?". Did some more digging around and found out as long as the bloody SSD wasn't actually in a RAID array, it would be running AHCI.

Benchmark puts me at about 280 MBs which is where the speed bottlenecks due to me using a SATA II connector instead of SATA III. I for the longest time still could not figure out why the hell it was taking me 1 minute and 18 seconds to actually boot into windows 7 Ultimate.

Guys.... do yourselves a favor... If you are taking a long time to boot into windows... check and see if you have any disconnected mapped drives and get rid of them.
That is all it was, I now have a boot speed of 28 seconds.

Persistence goes a long way.

 

[jivdis1x]

When sata set to RAID, it's running in AHCI and Trim too. It's part of the protocol. no need to change anything.

As long as the ssd is not part of a RAID array(single drive); the best mode for SATA is RAID cause later if you do want to set your drive in RAID it's there. RAID mode doesn't cause you to lose the AHCI feature or trim. You lose it when you put it into an array.

 

[groberts101]

tis true that single non-member drives will run in AHCI mode even when the bios is set to raid and will pass trim commands just fine.

 

[tcstech]

Thanks fellas, this has now become my favorite website! Case solved!.