SATA SSD Drive shows up as SCSI - Rediculously baffled...

[03stage2]

Hey guys,
Ill try and keep this straight and to the point but at this point myself, intel, and dell are baffled. I have a Dell XPS730 with the Nvidia Nforce 790i chipset. I run two 500 gig SATA drives under RAID 0. I recently installed an Intel X25 80 gig SSD and have ran into problems. Windows recognizes the drive as SCSI in device manager. Granted it works however because it is listed as SCSI TRIM and the intel toolbox wont work which makes an SSD useless.

After tons of research I have found that because of the Nvidia chipset it makes the drive show up as SCSI. I have tried Vista and Windows 7, both show it as SCSI. I have moved the SATA cable away from the other main 4 that support RAID with no luck. I have refomatted several times as well with no luck. I have completely disabled RAID in the bios and it STILL shows as SCSI. Is there any way to get around this? I have read that changing the nvidia controller drivers may work but im not sure what I would switch them to? I am totally lost and any info would be MUCH appreciated!

 

[theog]

Windows will do this with some Sata Controllers.

 

[rfcdvc45]

WD Black SATA displays as SCSI device

I have a similar issue with a WD Caviar Black with 6-GB/s support, that shows up in Device manager and Explorer as a SCSI device. I've heard that this is not uncommon. But why does it report this way? I have it plugged into the SATA 6 header on my Asus P6X58D-E, but the BIOS setup does not recognize it unless I move it to a SATA 3 header. And yet it seems to work correctly either way. I suppose it's a driver issue with either the mobo or the hard drive.

Just bugs me!

Any ideas?

 

[GeneO]

I have a similar issue with a WD Caviar Black with 6-GB/s support, that shows up in Device manager and Explorer as a SCSI device. I've heard that this is not uncommon. But why does it report this way? I have it plugged into the SATA 6 header on my Asus P6X58D-E, but the BIOS setup does not recognize it unless I move it to a SATA 3 header. And yet it seems to work correctly either way. I suppose it's a driver issue with either the mobo or the hard drive.

Just bugs me!

Any ideas?

That is because the SATA 6Gb/s port you have it plugged into on your motherboard is a separate Marvell controller which supports a SCSI driver. You will see a Marvell SCSI controller in the device manager too. Motherboard SATA controllers that are not part of the main chipset will often appear as SCSI devices. These extra controllers have their own BIOS so the drive will not appear as a drive in your motherboard's BIOS SATA drive page. You can configure the controller to display devices that are plugged into it as the computer boots up in the boot menu of your bios (you may have to turn off the splash screen to see it). Only drives on the SATA ports that are associated with Intel P67 chipset will show up in your BIOS SATA configuration page.

You also probably have a JMicron eSATA controller chip on your MB. This will also show up as a SCSI device.

Gene

 

[rfcdvc45]

I have a similar issue with a WD Caviar Black with 6-GB/s support, that shows up in Device manager and Explorer as a SCSI device. I've heard that this is not uncommon. But why does it report this way? I have it plugged into the SATA 6 header on my Asus P6X58D-E, but the BIOS setup does not recognize it unless I move it to a SATA 3 header. And yet it seems to work correctly either way. I suppose it's a driver issue with either the mobo or the hard drive.

Just bugs me!

Any ideas?

That is because the SATA 6Gb/s port you have it plugged into on your motherboard is a separate Marvell controller which supports a SCSI driver. You will see a Marvell SCSI controller in the device manager too. Motherboard SATA controllers that are not part of the main chipset will often appear as SCSI devices. These extra controllers have their own BIOS so the drive will not appear as a drive in your motherboard's BIOS SATA drive page. You can configure the controller to display devices that are plugged into it as the computer boots up in the boot menu of your bios (you may have to turn off the splash screen to see it). Only drives on the SATA ports that are associated with Intel P67 chipset will show up in your BIOS SATA configuration page.

You also probably have a JMicron eSATA controller chip on your MB. This will also show up as a SCSI device.

Gene

Gene, thanks for the explanation.

So this is strictly a case of how the device displays, and it matters not otherwise, is that correct? And finally, would the drive display correctly if I plugged it into the 3-GB/s connector? And if so, would there be any performance hit from having the hdd connected in this manner?

 

[GeneO]

I have a similar issue with a WD Caviar Black with 6-GB/s support, that shows up in Device manager and Explorer as a SCSI device. I've heard that this is not uncommon. But why does it report this way? I have it plugged into the SATA 6 header on my Asus P6X58D-E, but the BIOS setup does not recognize it unless I move it to a SATA 3 header. And yet it seems to work correctly either way. I suppose it's a driver issue with either the mobo or the hard drive.

Just bugs me!

Any ideas?

That is because the SATA 6Gb/s port you have it plugged into on your motherboard is a separate Marvell controller which supports a SCSI driver. You will see a Marvell SCSI controller in the device manager too. Motherboard SATA controllers that are not part of the main chipset will often appear as SCSI devices. These extra controllers have their own BIOS so the drive will not appear as a drive in your motherboard's BIOS SATA drive page. You can configure the controller to display devices that are plugged into it as the computer boots up in the boot menu of your bios (you may have to turn off the splash screen to see it). Only drives on the SATA ports that are associated with Intel P67 chipset will show up in your BIOS SATA configuration page.

You also probably have a JMicron eSATA controller chip on your MB. This will also show up as a SCSI device.

Gene

Gene, thanks for the explanation.

So this is strictly a case of how the device displays, and it matters not otherwise, is that correct? And finally, would the drive display correctly if I plugged it into the 3-GB/s connector? And if so, would there be any performance hit from having the hdd connected in this manner?

Yes and Yes and in all probability no. Either the SATA II or SATA III controllers can sustain that WD drive at full rate. If it were an SSD it would be a different story.

Gene

 

[rchris]

That is because the SATA 6Gb/s port you have it plugged into on your motherboard is a separate Marvell controller which supports a SCSI driver. You will see a Marvell SCSI controller in the device manager too. Motherboard SATA controllers that are not part of the main chipset will often appear as SCSI devices. These extra controllers have their own BIOS so the drive will not appear as a drive in your motherboard's BIOS SATA drive page. You can configure the controller to display devices that are plugged into it as the computer boots up in the boot menu of your bios (you may have to turn off the splash screen to see it). Only drives on the SATA ports that are associated with Intel P67 chipset will show up in your BIOS SATA configuration page.

You also probably have a JMicron eSATA controller chip on your MB. This will also show up as a SCSI device.

Gene

Gene, thanks for the explanation.

So this is strictly a case of how the device displays, and it matters not otherwise, is that correct? And finally, would the drive display correctly if I plugged it into the 3-GB/s connector? And if so, would there be any performance hit from having the hdd connected in this manner?

Yes and Yes and in all probability no. Either the SATA II or SATA III controllers can sustain that WD drive at full rate. If it were an SSD it would be a different story.

Gene

Hey, it's good to know I'm not alone. I have the same motherboard and WD Black drive and was also annoyed about the drive showing up as SCSI. I can confirm what Gene said since I also have an OCZ SSD (SATA 3/GB/s) plugged into the motherboard's 3-GB/s connector; it shows up correctly, i.e., NOT as SCSI. And, yes, it is a Marvell controller for the SATA 6-GB/s connectors. If you watch the bootup BIOS screens carefully (they flash by fast!), you'll see a line with the WD drive correctly shown as a SATA 6 GB/s drive.

 

[handy121]

I have run into this also. For me it did not start getting this problem until I loaded a Via 3 port PCI to SATA Card drivers into the system. The HKCUConfig shows all the listings for my SATA drives as SCSI. Removing the driver does not help. This is an internal windows flaw that I think could be fixed. I have installed the exact same drives in other windows XP systems and they don't show as either SATA or SCSI, just the drive model. This has got to be a Raid driver problem and Even though their may be performance issues, ie SCSI 340 vs SCSI 640, I don't even know which of these is being used, if any. I am hoping the Standards group comes up with a solution for this because some other country is going to be first and we can't have that. A SATA device is a SATA device and the operating system should report it as such. There must be a reg entry for this. Who can we e-mail or contact who knows how Windows recognizes devices and thus chooses the correct configuration? I don't know how long ago the Standards Group did SATA II or if they are about to do it, but I read most SATA Controllers are not even Standard in the add-on card and HDD housing device market, especially for the ESATA standard. Any info?

 

[GeneO]

So what is the problem? What are you worried about? Some SATA chipset manufacturers support their SATA devices with a SCSI driver. It is no big deal and not a conspiracy - you only loose a couple of things like being able to control Auto Acoustic mode, but that is it. performance is the same. You can use the Microsoft default SATA drive in some cases. For instance, if you uninstall the Marvell SCSI driver (uninstalling the software along with the device), Windows 7 will install its SATA drivers for the Marvell drives.

 

[handy121]

Scsi sata

Thank You, I don't know where you get the Conspiracy stuff from? Your absolutely correct and I apologize if I sounded tempered, I did not mean too. I was unaware that some manufactures do that. From a point of view of a consumer SATA is current technology and SCSI is old technology. That is all we know. It is hard for us to understand why a manufacturer would sell a SATA and give you SCSI. Turns out Windows knows best after all. You guys in the upper High Tech world see the world from a little different view than us consumers. One Tech on You Tube said the SATA I drives a whopping 40 M/s of actual data through put. SATA II is 80 M/s Not the 150 and 300 we hear so much about. So what are we to think? We need you guys to straighten us out on some of the High Tech stuff that don't jive. I just will not be happy until My computer can decide if IDE is SATA or SCSI. Mean while may the force be with you. 6 Gb/s Thank You for sharing that.

 

[GeneO]

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.

 

[unifex]

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.

 

[ferb2001]

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

 

[unifex]

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.

 

[ferb2001]

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.

 

[SavNout]

Thanks for the quick answer!

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 :shock:

 

[GeneO]

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

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.

 

[GeneO]

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.

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.

 

[GeneO]

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.

 

[GeneO]

Thanks for the quick answer!

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 :shock:

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.