HP Pavilion DV6 AHCI issue

[Pendaws]

I have an issue with a HP laptop that I find annoying.

The laptop belongs to a customer's Son and he brought it to me because it ran rather slow and so, I looked at it and told him that some more memory and a nice SSD would be good for him, anyway, the main issue here is the silly Setup in the BIOS.

I went to the trouble of getting the NEWEST BIOS update from HP and installed it. He wanted to have Win 7 on it again and so I installed it from a USB drive and it went flawlessly but, after setting all of it up I added the Samsung Magician software for some performance tweaking. the first thing I cam across was that the software said that AHCI wasn't active and that it couldn't tell what type of SATA it was. I have posted a question on HP forum but I hold no great hope of an answer but, you never can tell??

According to HP the driver that is loaded by the RST programme is sufficient for it but, it's a SATA/RAID driver and that appears to be what is causing the issue with Magician. I have seen a few articles on HP's site about this issue and they say it is ok but, obviously it isn't. There is no section in the device manager for IDE/ATA ATAPI the driver is shown in the storage section instead. Which, is where, the RAID driver usually ends up.

I am worrying for nothing or? I find it strange that a laptop that can ONLY handle a single drive would be setup for RAID?? I have seen this same silly thing before with Lenovo and Toshiba where they used raid config for the HDD, but they weren't SSD's.

I thought that this might have some smart people coming along to see and maybe have an answer?

 

[georgeks]

Pendaws the RAID term refers to the way the HDD is accessed.

AHCI - Advanced Host Controller Interface - this is a hardware mechanism that allows the software to communicate with Serial ATA (SATA) devices. It offers features such as hot-plugging and native command queuing (NCQ).


IDE - Integrated Drive Electronics - IDE is basically the "old" version of AHCI without hot-plugging and NCQ. (This is usually used during the Parallel ATA (PATA) era hard disks)


Now. AHCI mode and IDE mode -- what is it? IDE mode is to give you the greatest compatibility with older operating systems. While AHCI is as I mentioned above, modern version of the IDE -- use AHCI mode if you are running recent operating systems (Windows Vista+ and Linux kernel from 2.6.19+). IDE mode will allow you to connect older operating systems to SATA drives.


As I mentioned above, SATA is Serial ATA, and is the replacement for Parallel ATA (PATA) hard drives.


RAID - This is a storage technology where you combine multiple disks into a "single" unit, depending on the mode, there can be RAID-0 through RAID-6, and each with different configurations of the hard drive. I'll just explain the simple examples: RAID-0 which is striping but no parity or mirroring, this means there is no redundancy for data, If there is a failure on one disk, it will cause the data loss of the entire RAID array. Ex: You have 0110 as data to be written, 01 will go on Disk 1, and 10 will go on Disk 2, allowing for faster read/write access to the data.


RAID-1 - This is the opposite of RAID-0, which is mirroring without striping (no parity either). This basically means you have an exact clone of Disk 1 on Disk 2, in case Disk 1 fails.


RAID0+1 does both what RAID 1 and 0 does, that is to say striping (writing data simultaneously to two [or more] drives. plus mirroring in case of failure) the minimum amount of drives required for this type of setup is 4 IDENTICAL drives.


There are also RAID 2, 3, 4, 5 ,6. Which is just more implementation of different configurations of striping/parity/mirroring across drives.


That being said, your RAID mode will allow you for some type of RAID configuration, should you choose to do so.


Supplemental: Many SATA controllers can enable AHCI separately or in conjunction with RAID support. Intel recommends choosing RAID mode on their motherboards, which also enables AHCI, rather than AHCI/SATA mode for maximum flexibility (in case you ever want to build a RAID array), since there are some issues that occurs, usually BSOD, when you choose a different mode once an operating system has already been installed.

 

[Pendaws]

Well, RAID mode is impossible to use in this laptop. The laptop is different to a Desktop as the BIOS is very much different.
I do know about the IDE, SATA, AHCI, RAID, been using computers since the late 1980's
When I originally setup this laptop, the setting in the registry for AHCI start came up as a "3" and not "0" like it should
and, in the device manager, there is no group for IDE/ATA/ATAPI but is listed in storage controller and it makes a slight
difference to a computer that is able to set the AHCI mode separately.

Oh well, I guess it will remain one of the mysteries of Computers, thanks anyway.