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Marvell 9128 Sata 3.0 [6Gb/s] manifesting as IDE
Good evening- [warning...long post here]
I've been working these last few days on some recent upgrades to my GA-790FXTA-UD5 [Gigabyte] system, and I have found some puzzling issues. I did my original install of Win7-64 ultimate last year using the AHCI drivers from the beginning in order to get the extra speed at startup etc. All of my drives then were SATA 2.0 [3Gb/s], so I used ports 0 through 5 for my devices. SATA 3.0 [6Gb/s] ports 6,7 are Marvell 9128 and I never used them so I disabled the controller in the Bios. Since I didn't have any IDE devices, I never saw an IDE post at start up until now.
My new SATA 3.0 devices (1x WD 1 TB & 1x Hitachi 2 TB) are posting at start up under IDE Master 2 and IDE Master 3. Only my SATA 2.0 devices show up as SATA drives during the post. When I check the driver under Devices & Printers in the Win 7 OS, it shows the Marvell 6G controller is functioning fine. So...ummm...
1> I'm beginning to think that I need to treat the Marvell devices as the AHCI set up in that it has to be initiated at install to get it recognized correctly... yes/no?
2> I'm wondering if the bios post is just a shared bridge/PCIe bus issue from the IDE & Marvell Controller....
3> My top transfer so far between a SATA 3.0 drive to SATA 3.0 drive averages about 110 MB/s and that seems a bit slow (though faster than anything before.)
4>Another thought regarding speed is that I have 2 ATI 5870's working on the 2 PCIe x16 slots, so adding the SATA 3.0 to that might be bottlenecking the data... maybe?
5> Any thoughts on using a Crucial C300 on the Marvell SATA 3.0 update (Nov.2010) as a boot drive C: ? ie...TRIM issues, SATA 3.0 as IDE, bottleneck problems?
Any and all input greatly appreciated from this tired novice-techie,
JohnPC
PS. All my drivers are completely up to date thanks to this awesome site I found linked from a UK site: Station-Drivers: le site de drivers, bios, firmwares avec un forum d'aide. Unfortunately it's all in French, but its still very navigable if you know what you are looking for.