SSD Upgrade questions

Is that an Nvidia chipset on that board?

essenbe said:

Is that an Nvidia chipset on that board?

Yes, it's described as "NVIDIA nForce 790i Ultra SLI". The motherboard is the EVGA 132-ck-nf79. Would an alternate driver, such as the Intel iastor SATA driver work?

I don't believe it will work on an Nvidia chipset. If it will, EVGA would have IRST as one of the drivers for that board on their driver list, but I have never known an Nvidia chipset to have one. I seriously suspect you can't use it. If you installed Windows with the other windows hard drive connected, I suspect you can't boot without the other drive connected. I would try it just to see. It is fixable, so I would try it and see. We can work you through fixing it, if that is necessary.

Good point Steve, the EVGA site is horrible, I find the board but nothing about drivers, etc.

EVGA Download Center -7901 Ultra SLI > Only 1 option >All >windows 7 X64

But, IRST is for Intel chipsets. I don't believe Nvidia chipsets have AHCI mode.

essenbe said:

EVGA Download Center -7901 Ultra SLI > Only 1 option >All >windows 7 X64

But, IRST is for Intel chipsets. I don't believe Nvidia chipsets have AHCI mode.

Although there's no AHCI option in the BIOS I do have an AHCI entry in the Device Manager:

How many sata controllers do you have in BIOS?. Sometimes you have the chipset controller and a Marvel or ASMedia controller.

essenbe said:

How many sata controllers do you have in BIOS?. Sometimes you have the chipset controller and a Marvel or ASMedia controller.

I just looked through the BIOS settings and found one for a JMicron AHCI controller [enabled] The board has a single red SATA data port apart from the others so I guess that's it, but there's nothing in the manual about it. Tomorrow I can try connecting the SSD to it. Will I need to boot the Windows 7 DVD and run a repair?

If you swap SATA headers you may need to tell BIOS it is the boot device.

Britton30 said:

If you swap SATA headers you may need to tell BIOS it is the boot device.

Thanks for that. Here are a couple of screenshots of what's going on now. I don't know if it's better/worse/the same :) I hunted around for a JMicron specific SATA driver and found a few possibilities, but haven't been able to ID the embedded controller precisely yet. Any additional suggestions will be appreciated.