new firmware released 02HD - experiences so far?

[idata]

hey all,

so a couple of minutes ago intel released the new firmware. we could collect our experiences right here.

who did already perform the upgrade? who wants to be the first? XD

regards,

xout

[idata]

I just painlessly updated on a Win7 x64 Asus P55 board and turned on AHCI. Significant speedups are evident on the "before" and "after" reports below. Write speed seems somewhat slower than other 160 meg G2's here, but not sure if there's anything I can do.

[idata]

@tfield98, a few things that come to mind as possible causes for the lower writes:

• Write caching - make sure this is enabled in Device Manager.
• Rapid Storage Technology Drivers - check for the latest from Intel, these are newer than Matrix Storage Manager.
• Drive % Capacity used - SSD performance suffers as they fill up, so if you're near full that could be part of the reason.

Hope that helps, those writes do seem really low for a 160GB G2 with the firmware update attached to an Intel ICH/PCH.

[idata]

Thanks, chizow! Nice to see you here on the forum!

The drive still has about 86 megs free, so that's not an issue.

Because I'm sure I'm not alone in my ignorance, perhaps you could lay out the steps to confirming proper configuration for ACHI with the new upgrade.

The installation notes for the upgrade are excellent and easy to follow -- and they suggest rebooting the ISO to confirm that the upgrade to 02HD succeeded. That I did.

I changed the registry entry Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\msahci "start" to 0 and set the BIOS to ACHI. During reboot of Windows 7, I saw ACHI drivers being installed by Windows.

The Device Manager IDE ATA/ATAPI now shows a (new?) entry "Standard AHCI 1.0 Serial ATA Controller". But, how to confirm that AHCI is set up properly. And where does one check and set write cacheing?

And, the RST drivers? Are they reasonably generic? I'm not familiar wiht the driver world for SSDs/HDs. Are the default drivers in Win7 from Microsoft the MSM drivers and the RST replace them?

Any additional background information you can provide would be helpful to many of us. We all understand that Intel's role is providing the SSD and not general system configuration information. But, given the bleeding edge that all of us here are traversing, it would be helpful to get "the big picture" on all of this.

Will the SSD Toolkit be of any help on these issues? If so, I'm happy to wait for it before continuing.

THANKS!

[idata]

How do we find the RST drivers on the intel site? I did a search and came up with nothing. Then my google search only turned up this download (non-Intel) site which always makes me wary.

http://www.x-drivers.com/catalog/drivers/sata_controllers/companies/intel/models/ich10/13984.html

Regards,

Mike

[idata]

@tfield98 - Actually I checked your original picture again and noticed your results were from IDE to AHCI and that the AHCI results aren't too far off the mark from published/expected results. I wouldn't fret too much about whether you have AHCI properly set if you enabled AHCI in the BIOS then its just a matter of the OS installing the proper drivers, which it sounds like it did.

To turn on write caching, open Device Manager, click on the "Disk Drives" twisty and choose your 160GB G2. Then right-click, choose Properties > Policies. Check the "Enable Write On This Device" if its not enabled.

The RST drivers from what I've seen and read are meant to replace Intel's Matrix Storage Manager as their host controller driver package/manager. Its basically an updated driver and UI with a facelift. Its definitely not mainstream yet and only available unofficially, but then again, even Intel's official driver updates are a bit hard to keep tabs on. The ones I'm using were rumored to be WHQL-candidates a few months ago, and although I'm also adverse to installing unofficial non-WHQL drivers and software, the feedback and results for these were overwhelmingly good, so I gave them a try.

Here's a link to the OCZ forums discussing them and providing the download link, you can see many users are reporting good results as it seems they're optimized for Win7 and SSDs:

http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=63480 http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=63480

Lastly, the default/generic drivers from Win7 are the ones that have TRIM enabled by default, but these drivers are typically tweaked for compatibility and reliability, not performance. The IMSM and RST package drivers do not currently support TRIM, I think this is what many are hoping for in the next driver release (IMSM or RST) as the gains from using Intel's tweaked driver over MS's generic driver are tangible. The SSD Toolkit comes into play here as it allows the user to initiate a manual TRIM process on their drives.

The big picture is the hopes Intel builds TRIM support into their higher performance driver packages so that TRIM commands are executed each time the SSD is written to rather than relying on manual TRIM maintenance from the end-user. In the meantime, G2 users will have to rely on the SSD Toolkit for TRIM when it becomes available again. Of course, both options are better than the alternatives with no TRIM, which is increasing performance degradation with increased writes with no way to restore that performance other than backing up the drive, secure erasing it with HDDErase, and then restoring the drive's content. Hope that helps.