X25-M 80 giga low performance - "IDE mode" fault?

[idata]

Last january I replaced the Hard Disk in my netbook (LG X110-L.B7WHP1) with a X25-m 80 Gig ver.2 and installed win7.

Made no change in my BIOS configuration, that promptually recognized the new component and allowed me to perform a clean install of windows 7 32 bits.

After weeks of usage, I´ve gotten the feeling that the netbook bootup time didn´t change and all, as well as general performance. Only thing positively affected was battery autonomy (expensive way to achieve that).

Also bothered me to see thar Win 7 didn´t allowed native TRIM funtionality in my setup. (one of the reasons I installed Win 7 on my netbook).

Now, after reading others posts on this community, I understood I had something missing in my setup: AHCI support!

According to intel website, the chipset installed in my netbook (discovered by intel application), 82801GBM, supports AHCI, but my netbook´s BIOS doesn´t allow change in HDD mode. It says ´IDE mode´ and that´s it.

I ran AS SSD Benchmark and compared with results published in other posts. It´s less than 50% that others users are getting with X25-M in AHCI mode.

AS SSD Benchmark 1.4.3645.3568

------------------------------Name: INTEL SSDSA2M080G2GC ATA DeviceFirmware: 2CV102HDController: intelideOffset: 103424 K - OKSize: 74,53 GBDate: 21/02/2010 00:36:47------------------------------Sequential:------------------------------Read: 120,39 MB/sWrite: 59,58 MB/s------------------------------4K:------------------------------Read: 13,46 MB/sWrite: 16,13 MB/s------------------------------4K-64Threads:------------------------------Read: 19,10 MB/sWrite: 28,25 MB/s------------------------------Access Times:------------------------------Read: 0,177 msWrite: 0,221 ms------------------------------Score:------------------------------Read: 45Write: 50Total: 121------------------------------

My questions are:

1- Is the lack of AHCI the sole responsible for the low performance of my X25-M?

2- Can I enable AHCI mode of my chipset without relying on BIOS to activate it (since my BIOS doesn´t offer me such option)?

Thanks

[MBall5]

Hello, I would like to let you know that in order for you to enjoy all the benefits of the Solid State Drive you need to select the AHCI option from the BIOS, if you cannot or do not know how to do this I suggest to contact the OEM manufacturer of your pc.

AHCI is a hardware mechanism that allows software to communicate with SATA drives. To make that transaction smoother, SATA devices were initially designed to handle legacy ATA commands so they could look and act like PATA devices. That is why many motherboards have "legacy" or IDE modes for SATA devices – in that case users are not required to provide additional drivers during OS installation. However, Windows 7 ships with AHCI drivers built in, so soon this mode will no longer be necessary.

But this begs the question: what features does AHCI mode enable? The answer isn't simple, but one of the bigger advantages is NCQ, or native command queuing.

NCQ is a technology that allows hard drives to internally optimize the order of the commands they receive in order to increase their performance. In an SSD everything is different. There is no need to optimize the command queue, but the result of enabling NCQ is the same – there is a performance increase. In brief, NCQ in an Intel SSD enables concurrency in the drive so that up to 32 commands can be executed in parallel.

[idata]

I think you're stuck with SATA I (1.5Gbps). The read speed cap indicates that and your write speed seems corresponding to what this drive can do. Note that your notebook vendor can disable SATA II in favor of SATA even if both the chipset and drive are SATA II ready. The best weapon of ssds is the latency anyway.. But if you feel the drive is slow, I'd check if it's partitioned correctly.