Windows 7: SATA SSD Drive shows up as SCSI - Rediculously baffled...

SATA is the bus interface to your drive - using a SCSI device driver doesn't make your disk drive a SCSI drive. In fact, SATA drives are still getting issued ATA commands (which harken back to you parallel IDE drives btw - that is old technology), unless you use AHCI mode. SCSI isn't ancient and dead either. Enterprise drives now are SAS (Serial attached SCSI - the counterpart of SATA), which is pretty recent. In fact you can plug SATA drives into SAS ports.

The only problem I have found with the SCSI implementations like JMicron, Marvell, etc. are that there are some ATA commands you cannot issue (like changing the acoustic mode). Most all of the SCSI drivers for SATA now support SMART.

These manufacturers are just programming in a driver model they are comfortable with. And, in fact, if Windows actually recognizes and supports the device, like in the case of Marvell, you can use the windows SATA drivers instead.



Actually you can get upwards of 200 MB/s on SATA II. Most hard drives drives just can't do it. SSDs can and do. SATA II can support those speeds, the actual hardware cannot in most cases (the exceptions being SSDs or raid arrays). Don't believe everything you hear on you tube, that tech is just plain wrong. The reason it seems like improving interfaces have improved performance is that the disk drives themselves have improved along with the SATA interface spec, but have never been limited by the (current) SATA capability. That is in fact, what you want, the SATA capability to keep ahead of the drive capability.

Quote:

Second generation SATA interfaces running at 3.0 Gbit/s are shipping in high volume as of 2010[update], and prevalent in all SATA disk drives and the majority of PC and server chipsets. With a native transfer rate of 3.0 Gbit/s, and taking 8b/10b encoding into account, the maximum uncoded transfer rate is 2.4 Gbit/s (300 MB/s).

Quote:

Serial ATA International Organization presented the draft specification of SATA 6 Gbit/s physical layer in July 2008, and ratified its physical layer specification on August 18, 2008. The full 3.0 standard was released on May 27, 2009. It provides peak throughput of about 600 MB/s including the protocol overhead (10b/8b coding with 8 bits to one byte). While even the fastest conventional hard disk drives can barely saturate the original SATA 1.5 Gbit/s bandwidth, Solid-State Drives have already saturated the SATA 3 Gbit/s limit at 285 MB/s net read speed and 250 MB/s net write speed with the Sandforce 1200 and 1500 controller.

Source: This Wikipedia article. It provides fairly detailed information on the SATA interface and its various versions.

Now, what is implied in this article (in fact in the second quote above), is that one has to distinguish between the "interface data transfer rate capability" and "physical disk transfer rate". The numbers you see often quoted, such as 3Gb/s and 6Gb/s, these are characteristics of the SATA interface. They have nothing to do with the actual hard drives you might be using. In particular, the "old-fashioned" mechanical drives are way slower, see a comparison chart on Tom's Hardware.

Hello

In fact GeneO it's not true that we do not care if the drive is seen as SCSI by windows and not SATA as long as it's works. I have a SSD intel 510 connected to my sata 6bg port (marvell) on my ASUS P7P55D-E mobo and windows sees it as a SCSI drive. This implies that I'm barely at 33% of my potential speed and the TRIM capability is not support. This is a bigger problem than just not being able to "changing the acoustic mode".

Was that issue really fixed? How can I make windows see the good drive?

Thanks

Well, I may be wrong - in which case I expect someone to correct me - but the SCSI interface has evolved over time. According to this Wikipedia article, the maximum bandwidth of the latest iteration of SCSI is 640 MB/s. While certainly way below the 6 GB/s SATA bandwidth, this is still more than sufficient for your drive, rated at 500 MB/s maximum (source). Therefore, assuming Windows 7 is aware of the latest (and now rather old since it's dated 2003) SCSI iteration, you are not losing anything in terms of speed.

TRIM is another matter, it can't be enabled over SCSI, but your drive is not really SCSI, your drive is SATA. You can simply check whether TRIM is enabled in your current setup: just open a command prompt as administrator and type

fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

if the result is 0, then TRIM is in fact enabled.

Thanks for the quick answer!

About the speed. I do lose speed. The SCSI driver may not be what is limiting it, but my benchmark are around 66% lower than the specs and lower than every benchmark I've seen post online by other user like me. I still have a pretty fast drive, but I've paid for top of the line and I'm getting specs from a old ssd so I'm a little dissapointed... I'll keep working on that.

I've run the line you gave me (thanks!) and it said that trim is enable which is good. That mean that intel were wrong when they told me that this was the problem limiting the speed.

I've notice my Marvell bios drivers are out of date on my board. I'll try to update them to see it it helps windows detecting the proper drive and getting the speed back up. However, I haven't figure how to do it yet. Am I suppose to do that with the windows installation?

Thanks again, I'll work more on that this week end.

Ferb or Anyone,

I too have the same issue as you. Running ASUS Rampage III Formula MB With a OCZ SSD Boot Disk and a WD Raptor and both are reconized as SCSI and not SATA. Their both plugged into my 2 SATA III ports and ACHI is enabled in bios on all my SATA ports.

Got into the Marvell Config at boot....but it only is used for setting up a raid. Cant set up a Raid on a 60gig SSD and a 600gig Raptor...unless it were to use JOBD but none the less...the raptor would never be able to keep up.

Ive updated all my drivers....my SSD is my Active system Drive....just cant get Device Mgr to reconize the Raptor or the OCZ SSD as a SATA drive. Im loosing boo-koo speed like u...unable to run at 6gps more like 1.5

If anyone can lend a hand I would greatly appreciate it. Driving me crazy.
I did a clean install of windows on this SSD....had a hell of a time getting windows to use the Marvell Drivers...think I ended up using Intel Drivers to make windows see the Drive. Read somewhere that this was a error in Windows 7 Ultimate. Not sure, was up all night...I know that I finally was able to get windows 7 to install...just need to get it to reconize these SATA III drives as SATA and NOT SCSI.

Thanks All
Sav

The Marvell controller doesn't support TRIM no matter what interface driver you have. Why do you think it implies that you are only at 33% of your potential speed - that is plain rubbish.

Ths SCSI interface for the Marvell is running at SATA speed. Has nothing to do with SCSI, it is just using that driver interface.

You are enabling TRIM in windows but it doesn't matter because the Marvell controller doesn't support it. The Marvell controller doesn't pass the TRIM command on to the drive.

The Marvell controller is basically crap. It won't run any faster for HDD, and even with SATA3 SSD, though it performs better with sequential transfers than SATA2, its overall performance is worse than the Intel SATA2 controller. My system boots faster and performs better with my SSD on the Intel SATA2 than on the Marvell SATA3 controller. It has nothing to do with using the SCSI driver - it performs just as badly with the Microsoft generic SATA controller. It is the controller, not the driver.

The only SATA driver you can use for the Marvell controller is the generic Microsoft SATA driver. The only way you can make that happen is to uninstall and remove the Marvell SCSI miniport device driver and software from your system, either via Control Panel -> add remove Programs or from the device manager -> Marvell Controller -> properties -> uninstall and choose to uninstall software as well (but I wouldn't do the latter unless you have experience doing this). Once you reboot then, the Microsoft drivers will get installed for the device.

Having said that it won't make a whit of difference - though you may be more comfortable with the Microsoft driver.