X25-M 80GB G2 and Nvidia 680i

[idata]

I just wanted to share my experience with using the new intel 80gb x25-m G2 with an older platform like the 680i. The drive I obtained was the 7mm without the spacer and it came with the 02G9 firmware. The first thing I wanted to do was install the new 02HD firmware. I was a little worried about this process becuase my board does not support AHCI mode. I should note that I have the EVGA 680i and at this point I was on the P32 bios. I downloaded the ISO from intel that had the new firmware and burned it to a CD on a separate machine. In the bios on my 680i I set the boot priority to boot from CD-ROM and saved and exited. The update process worked like a charm without any problems and the X25 firmware was successfully flashed to 02HD.

Next I decided to get the latest bios for my board. I had an alienware board which is not friendly with the stock EVGA bios. However, you can override the serial number check by downloading the P33 bios from EVGA and burning it to a CD. Go through the normal bios update procedure and when the flash tool kicks you out saying "the board numbers do not match" or something like that, it will dump you to what looks like an old DOS prompt. Override the check and force the bios flash with the following command line switches:

AWDFLASH.EXE NF68P33.bin /py/sn/cc /f /ld

Anyway, this is just a side note for anybody out there with a 680i from alienware because they won't allow this trick to be posted on their forums. Now that I had the latest bios, the latest firmware on my X25 and a copy of Win7 Pro x64, I went ahead with the standard windows clean install. This process also went off without a hitch. Once windows was booted up for the first time, I noticed that windows DID NOT do what it said it would do with a clean install on SSD's. Posts from tomshardware note that by default, on an SSD, win 7 should disable prefetch, superfetch, readyboost, and defrag. This was not the case and I had to do all this manually. Basically I followed the Vista SSD guide posted on the OCZ forums. Lastly, I went into device manager to check under ATAPI devices to see what driver was being used. Sure enough it was the standard PCI dual channel IDE controller driver that supposedly supports TRIM. I'm not sure how to test if TRIM is working, but other posts on this forum seem to indicate that either PCIIDE.sys or the AHCI standard driver support TRIM.

I also went a step further and setup 3x250GB seagate drives in a RAID 5 array. I only enabled RAID for the ports that these 3 drives were plugged into. I did not make any modifications in the bios that would tamper with my X25. Once I set up the RAID array and went into windows, I had to use the windows disk manager under administrative tools in the control panel to format the array and get windows to recognize it, but this went without issue. I think I got one message that said "this drive could not be formatted" but it must have been a glitch because it went ahead and formatted the drives and they work perfectly.

This is my experience with the new X25 G2 on the 680i platform. I hope this helps anyone out there who is considering upgrading an older platform.

I just wanted to share my experience with using the new intel 80gb x25-m G2 with an older platform like the 680i. The drive I obtained was the 7mm without the spacer and it came with the 02G9 firmware. The first thing I wanted to do was install the new 02HD firmware. I was a little worried about this process becuase my board does not support AHCI mode. I should note that I have the EVGA 680i and at this point I was on the P32 bios. I downloaded the ISO from intel that had the new firmware and burned it to a CD on a separate machine. In the bios on my 680i I set the boot priority to boot from CD-ROM and saved and exited. The update process worked like a charm without any problems and the X25 firmware was successfully flashed to 02HD.

Next I decided to get the latest bios for my board. I had an alienware board which is not friendly with the stock EVGA bios. However, you can override the serial number check by downloading the P33 bios from EVGA and burning it to a CD. Go through the normal bios update procedure and when the flash tool kicks you out saying "the board numbers do not match" or something like that, it will dump you to what looks like an old DOS prompt. Override the check and force the bios flash with the following command line switches:

AWDFLASH.EXE NF68P33.bin /py/sn/cc /f /ld

Anyway, this is just a side note for anybody out there with a 680i from alienware because they won't allow this trick to be posted on their forums. Now that I had the latest bios, the latest firmware on my X25 and a copy of Win7 Pro x64, I went ahead with the standard windows clean install. This process also went off without a hitch. Once windows was booted up for the first time, I noticed that windows DID NOT do what it said it would do with a clean install on SSD's. Posts from tomshardware note that by default, on an SSD, win 7 should disable prefetch, superfetch, readyboost, and defrag. This was not the case and I had to do all this manually. Basically I followed the Vista SSD guide posted on the OCZ forums. Lastly, I went into device manager to check under ATAPI devices to see what driver was being used. Sure enough it was the standard PCI dual channel IDE controller driver that supposedly supports TRIM. I'm not sure how to test if TRIM is working, but other posts on this forum seem to indicate that either PCIIDE.sys or the AHCI standard driver support TRIM.

I also went a step further and setup 3x250GB seagate drives in a RAID 5 array. I only enabled RAID for the ports that these 3 drives were plugged into. I did not make any modifications in the bios that would tamper with my X25. Once I set up the RAID array and went into windows, I had to use the windows disk manager under administrative tools in the control panel to format the array and get windows to recognize it, but this went without issue. I think I got one message that said "this drive could not be formatted" but it must have been a glitch because it went ahead and formatted the drives and they work perfectly.

This is my experience with the new X25 G2 on the 680i platform. I hope this helps anyone out there who is considering upgrading an older platform.

[idata]

Adam, I also have the 680i and the new Intel 160Gb SSD. i just bought the SSD and am waiting to update the firmware and then install it along with Windows & 64-bit. My question for you is what did you set your SATA controller to before you updated the firmware since there is no AHCI? I currently have 2 HDD in RAID 0 mode and I know that I need to disable the RAID,but don't know what to set the SATA controller mode to.