Too many conflicting posts in this forum!

[idata]

I've read a whole bunch of posts about IDE, AHCI, Toolbox and trim. What a mess. I can't find head from tail.So many contradictory posts. Are some people giving opinions based on posts they've read.. which might be false to being with!?

Is their some official support forum from Intel where Intel support employees can give authoratative answers or because this is a community forum anything goes? I really don't want to bother with I-am-Not-sure answers. I need definite yes or no.

I would like to see an official FAQ from intel answering the common questions. Such as.. does Trim work on IDE port or not (regardles if I should be using AHCI)

I have seen two visible camps around this question.

[idata]

Thanks for the info redux, how did I miss this? I suspect that certain E-tailers have (accidently or not) added to my confusion by having several offerings of the same basic model, including apparently OEM versions. They also seem to imply that one model variant is preferable to another, or that there are functional differences between them.

Frankly, I am not seeing the exact or full model numbers on these lists that correspond to the units I have. It does not matter since there isn't any significant differences between them, and these model numbers are probably simply differing manufacturing codes used for internal accounting purposes. Thanks again!

[idata]

Synthetic benchmarks scores will vary depending on the condition of the drive and any background services that might be running when you run the test.

I normally come in around 420 with RST drivers but all the results posted above are OK. You are unlikely to see a visible difference between 360 & 420.

This run was my best on a freshly formatted drive on an Intel ICH9 chipset. I haven't been able to reproduce it since so it was a bit of a fluke.

EDIT: And my drive is a 160GB version so the sequential write speed specs are faster than the 80GB drives.

That's a great score, and interesting since you were in IDE mode rather that AHCI. From what I've read AHCI is supposed to be superior to IDE regarding performance of an SSD. I saw a comparison test of an SSD running in IDE or AHCI modes, I don't recall the drivers used. Although the tests found that AHCI mode provided better performance, the difference was minimal IMO, paricularly for the average home PC user. There certainly are good reasons to use AHCI mode, which provides hot-swapping capability and NCQ support. If SSD users can only use IDE mode for some reason, they aren't missing much it seems.

Here's one I ran not long ago, on a fairly fresh Win 7 64bit installation. This is on an X58/ICH10R, i7-930 system, AHCI mode.

[idata]

That was a very early version of AS SSB Benchmark and rather confusingly it shows IDE when in fact it was set to AHCI mode. I could not have got those scores in IDE mode.

Sorry for the confusion.

[idata]

No problem redux, I was wondering about that (rather complex) version number, which had me looking at mine, and all the others. My copy was downloaded recently on that PC.

Below is a link to a review/test of a few SSDs performance in AHCI and IDE mode. Unfortunately they did not use an Intel SSD in their testing, but I feel the results were quite interesting, I was surprised that... well, I won't spoil it for you. I personally don't agree with the authors conclusions.

http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=505&Itemid=38 http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=505&Itemid=38