Avoid AMD AHCI driver at all costs

[KrispyKreme50]

I'm looking to pair my 780G/SB700 with a SSD, should I run it in RAID mode to take advantage of NCQ?

 

[thevan]

Just looking to find out if the various issues with AMD AHCI drivers (chiefly TRIM support and performance) have been fixed in the newer versions? I've read that 10.9 and newer support TRIM. True? And what about performance? Am I still better off using the MS AHCI drivers instead, despite their high CPU usage?

 

[Elixer]

No issues at all with the latest AMD AHCI drivers on a 890FX chipset.

 

[Makaveli]

nice necro on this 6 month old thread!

 

[Modular]

nice necro on this 6 month old thread!

Well, it makes sense that he would since this issue has threads written about it all over the internet that end in this same way - with no conclusion.

Thanks for adding something valuable D:

 

[thevan]

No issues at all with the latest AMD AHCI drivers on a 890FX chipset.

Excellent!

Can anyone confirm the same for 600 and 700 series chipsets? (other than a lack of TRIM support I assume)

 

[(sic)Klown12]

Excellent!

Can anyone confirm the same for 600 and 700 series chipsets? (other than a lack of TRIM support I assume)

The driver works great, and it does support TRIM. It's a few percent faster than the default MS driver in sequential and random I/O.

790FX chipset with SB750.

 

[Modular]

Can someone check their device manager and let me know what driver date and number they show for these please?

 

[(sic)Klown12]

Here's the latest AHCI driver. It's been used for the last three months, only distributed in a new package every month.

 

[tcsenter]

Here's the latest AHCI driver. It's been used for the last three months, only distributed in a new package every month.

That's in IDE/ATA compatibility mode, not AHCI.

 

[(sic)Klown12]

That's in IDE/ATA compatibility mode, not AHCI.

Only my eSATA is in IDE mode(external drive in AHCI mode causes BSOD on boot), the normal SATA ports are all in AHCI.

If all ports were in IDE mode, I wouldn't be able to install the AMD AHCI drive to begin with.

 

[tcsenter]

OK, you're right. AMD changed its device naming scheme at some point. Some previous versions used to state "AHCI" in the device name when in AHCI mode, but after checking it seems they have removed this reference.

 

[Modular]

Here's the latest AHCI driver. It's been used for the last three months, only distributed in a new package every month.

Thanks for posting that! I just checked mine and I don't have the "AMD Sata Driver" listed under my IDE devices. Could that be because I'm running a RAID setup?

Can you tell me what options you have under "Storage Controllers" please? It's 10 slots below the IDE/ATA Controller.

 

[(sic)Klown12]

For Storage Controller, the only thing listed is Virtual CloneDrive. As for RAID being the reason you don't have the AMD driver, I can't say. I don't run RAID on any of my AMD setups.

 

[Modular]

Yeah, I'm using RAID 0 for my Samsung F3 array. The Kingston 64GB SSD is only the OS. It's getting really confusing to configure this to be working with TRIM. I may just have to grab an SSD with garbage collection and be done with it...

 

[loimlo]

I'm running Kingston 64GB SSD on my AMD 770+SB700 board. The TRIM is working normally as I ran and kept AS-SSD bench results every month...... Kingston SSD scored relative consistently across the board. Sometimes, the Sequential Read/Write may drop a bit, but it will come back one or two months later. Win7 WEI once dropped to 6.7, but bounced back 6.8

Reference:
AMD 770+SB700
Kingston 64GB SSD (SNV425-S2)
Win7 x64, MSAHCI driver
14 months use time. 14 AS-SSD records.

 

[loimlo]

Yeah, I'm using RAID 0 for my Samsung F3 array. The Kingston 64GB SSD is only the OS. It's getting really confusing to configure this to be working with TRIM. I may just have to grab an SSD with garbage collection and be done with it...

RAID doesn't support TRIM, regardless of Intel/AMD/MS SATA drivers ....... find a SSD which has better resilient ability due to strong garbage collection and wear-leveling for you.

 

[Modular]

RAID doesn't support TRIM, regardless of Intel/AMD/MS SATA drivers ....... find a SSD which has better resilient ability due to strong garbage collection and wear-leveling for you.

I believe that Intel's latest drivers do indeed support TRIM for an SSD that is not part of an array, even if an array is enabled on the system.

 

[velis]

My windows experience index jumped from 7.2 to 7.6 on my Intel X25-M 80GB G2 + 790GX chipset just by installing AMD driver today.
Haven't done any other tests though.

 

[taltamir]

I believe that Intel's latest drivers do indeed support TRIM for an SSD that is not part of an array, even if an array is enabled on the system.

He clearly quoted a person who was running RAID0. Thus he isn't referring to "Enabling RAID in the motherboard BIOS" but to an actual raid array.

But yes, you are correct that if you enable RAID in the mobo on an intel system, non RAID drives on that system do get TRIM.

There is also absolutely no technical reason for RAID not to support TRIM; It is simply that nobody made a controller that does that, yet.

 

[sub.mesa]

There is also absolutely no technical reason for RAID not to support TRIM; It is simply that nobody made a controller that does that, yet.

There's alot of misconception on this topic.

If you're doing software RAID on Linux of BSD, you get TRIM over RAID, works just fine.

But if you're doing RAID on Windows, you cannot have TRIM support. This has to do with the fact that Windows regards RAID as a SCSI disk, rather than a native interface based on ATA. As such, the RAID array is interfaced through SCSI and can only receive SCSI commands. TRIM on the other hand, is an ATA command, defined in ATA8-ACS specification. Thus it is currently not possible to send TRIM commands to a RAID driver on the Windows platform, because that RAID driver is regarded as SCSI disk device by Windows.

As such, the limitation that TRIM does not work over RAID is a Windows design limitation, as it works just fine on non-Windows Operating Systems like FreeBSD and Linux. I recall reading something about Windows 8 addressing this issue, but I think it's fair to assume that this limitation will never go away on the Windows 7 platform. Windows+RAID = SCSI = no TRIM.

 

[taltamir]

There is also absolutely no technical reason for RAID not to support TRIM; It is simply that nobody made a controller that does that, yet.

But if you're doing RAID on Windows, you cannot have TRIM support. This has to do with the fact that Windows regards RAID as a SCSI disk, rather than a native interface based on ATA. As such, the RAID array is interfaced through SCSI and can only receive SCSI commands. TRIM on the other hand, is an ATA command, defined in ATA8-ACS specification. Thus it is currently not possible to send TRIM commands to a RAID driver on the Windows platform, because that RAID driver is regarded as SCSI disk device by Windows.

As such, the limitation that TRIM does not work over RAID is a Windows design limitation, as it works just fine on non-Windows Operating Systems like FreeBSD and Linux. I recall reading something about Windows 8 addressing this issue, but I think it's fair to assume that this limitation will never go away on the Windows 7 platform. Windows+RAID = SCSI = no TRIM.

A software limitation in a popular OS is not a technical reason why raid cannot support TRIM. And as you said yourself this will be fixed in win8, not to mention you could add TRIM to SCSI spec or alter windows7 / make speciality driver (there are some amazing things done with drivers, from sandboxes, very advanced DRM schemes, and the very advanced emulators that fool said DRM schemes...) to make ATA RAID in windows7 and earlier. It is just a lot of work that nobody is willing to do for older OS. MS is willing to make the effort for the next generation of their OS (aka, they want to be paid for it) and linux and BSD already did it as you said.

By your very own statement you CAN have RAID TRIM on windows... you are just going to need to install a paid for software upgrade (windows 8)

Finally, when I said "controller" I explicitly referred to hardware RAID not pure software RAID. Which, like the other examples, is entirely doable but takes work.

 

[jhansman]

Latest (11.8 package) AMD ACHI drivers are fine. They turned in slightly higher numbers on my M4 than did the Win7 drivers, and my system seems a bit snappier than before, but that may just be me.

 

[Arkaign]

It's really good to hear that AMD got on the AHCI/SATA driver performance issues. I used to think I was crazy, I had a gigabyte UD4P or some such mobo (whatever the high end was about a year ago), and the hard drive performance was terrible no matter what I did. IDE mode doesn't support NCQ either, so even that was a poor workaround.

 

[notposting]

I actually switched my rig to Intel because of this stuff a couple years ago. Glad it's fixed finally (hopefully?).

They had problems dating back to the SB600 chipsets at least...I remember on my SB700 I could either run the MS drivers (fine, but high CPU), AMD drivers (lower performance, lower CPU but still 25-30&#37, or AMD + RAID drivers (okay performance, lower but still mediocre CPU use, around 5-10%, but lose SMART and temp monitoring data).