Poor SSD performance: AMD RAID and AHCI Issues. WEI 5.9

I recently upgraded to an SSD. I moved windows 7 over to the new SSD and re-aligned the partition properly

The drive setup is as follows:
2x 500GB WD Black drives in RAID 0
1x 120GB ADATA S510 SSD

In BIOS, RAID mode is enabled. You cannot enable RAID for one pair of drives and AHCI separately. I was assuming disks that are not part of the logical RAID volumes would be set to AHCI automatically. I have enabled NCQ in AMD RaidExpert for the SSD.

WEI is 5.9 for the primary disk. The primary disk is the SSD.

Other strange behanivour is that the RAID array and the SSD both appear as SCSI devices in device manager, and Windows won't accept the ahci drivers from ECS.

Below is the benchmark showing poor performance.



Ideas?? Many thanks.

Here are my winsat scores:

> Run Time 00:00:00.03
> Run Time 00:00:00.00
> CPU LZW Compression 371.31 MB/s
> CPU AES256 Encryption 192.22 MB/s
> CPU Vista Compression 694.62 MB/s
> CPU SHA1 Hash 1401.83 MB/s
> Uniproc CPU LZW Compression 92.68 MB/s
> Uniproc CPU AES256 Encryption 47.78 MB/s
> Uniproc CPU Vista Compression 173.33 MB/s
> Uniproc CPU SHA1 Hash 350.64 MB/s
> Memory Performance 13669.49 MB/s
> Direct3D Batch Performance 171.69 F/s
> Direct3D Alpha Blend Performance 172.50 F/s
> Direct3D ALU Performance 57.91 F/s
> Direct3D Texture Load Performance 55.75 F/s
> Direct3D Batch Performance 154.73 F/s
> Direct3D Alpha Blend Performance 153.50 F/s
> Direct3D ALU Performance 52.37 F/s
> Direct3D Texture Load Performance 43.15 F/s
> Direct3D Geometry Performance 101.65 F/s
> Direct3D Geometry Performance 135.60 F/s
> Direct3D Constant Buffer Performance 39.04 F/s
> Video Memory Throughput 5025.35 MB/s
> Dshow Video Encode Time 2.43249 s
> Media Foundation Decode Time 0.82079 s
> Disk Sequential 64.0 Read 124.07 MB/s 6.9
> Disk Random 16.0 Read 33.23 MB/s 6.2

Any ideas?

I'm not sure whether to blame AMD or ECS for this, but it sounds like a poor motherboard, in terms of drive options. I've always been all Intel for one very important reason...the chipsets. Intel's motherboard chipsets are far better than anything AMD processors have to rely on. ECS has also been known for a long long time for producing less than quality boards. When I started building PCs in the late 90's, they were referred to as Extra Crappy Sh!t.

I realize that isn't very helpful, but you may not be able to use AHCI with your current board. If so, and none of the alternatives are suitable, you may want to consider a better board that gives you better control over your SATA ports.

I checked your system specs. Can you enable AHCI if you don't use RAID? Striped arrays are all hype and no substance, so I'd be more than willing to break a useless array to gain speed on my system volume.

i had a similar issue....heres the fix.

enable ahci and disable raid mode in bios. this will speed up your ssd as its not as fast in a non ahci setup.

you can still setup the two other hdds as a raid setup in windows afterwards in disk manager.