Going from SATA2 to SATA3

mothermachine

mothermachine

mothermachine

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Hi folks,

I currently have win7 installed on my SSD (Crucial C300) via sata 2 to my normal on-board SATA2 controller. I've just ordered a new SATA3 controller PCI card and SATA3 cable.

Can I just plug the SSD into the new controller and expect everything to boot ok or will I need to do some jiggery pokery or even format?

Cheers,
 
Wouldn't of thought you have to reformat.

I'd simply:

1) Install new card while SSD is plugged into SATA2 port.
2) boot windows, Install device driver (if necessary), reboot.
3) Check Windows recognises card properly after reboot.
4) Power Down.
5) Swap over SSD to new card.
6) Boot to windows...

And keep ya fingers crossed :D
 
cheers sounds good to me! that was kinda what i was hoping to do. hopefully it will be that simple. i wonder if i'll be able to get it all running using AHCI as well as I had to use IDE to get it to work under sata2.

cheers!
 
mothermachine said:
cheers sounds good to me! that was kinda what i was hoping to do. hopefully it will be that simple. i wonder if i'll be able to get it all running using AHCI as well as I had to use IDE to get it to work under sata2.

cheers!
Click to expand...

To get AHCI running on the new card. I would install the card, and boot as normal (with SSD from on board).

I would then install the AHCI drivers for new card, then switch computer off and move the SSD over to new card.

If you put the SSD on new card, then install drivers I expect the computer won't boot - as it's booting off a card that does not have it's AHCI drivers installed yet.

I have just done the same process on a Gigabyte P55 board, but booting from the onboard Gigabyte SATA, so I can install AHCI on the intel SATA. Once the Intel AHCI drivers were installed I shut down and booted from Intel controller.

Hope that makes sense.
 
right, this has NOT gone well at all!

I've done the following:

1) installed new U3S6 card (into 4X slot, also tried 16X slot)
2) rebooted
3) let win7 install its own drivers
4) installed the supplied marvell drivers from CD (not sure this was a good idea..)
5) turned off
6) connected SSD to SATA600 port 1 via brand new SATA600 cable
7) turned on
8) watched as Marvell BIOS loads but sits at "Initializing." for about 3 mins
9) finally it detects the C300 but goes no further, hanging at "DMI. blah blah" screen

I've tried disabling on-board SATA but it makes no difference. No matter what I do, when the C300 is connected to the new SATA600 controller the PC will not boot. As soon as I remove the C300 it will boot (either into BIOS or into win7 if I move the C300 back to on-board SATA).

I've read some bad things around the interwebs about compatibility between the U3S6 and Gigabyte mobos but surely there's a way to get this thing to work....

Any ideas?

Cheers,
 
I've also tried resetting CMOS/BIOS back to Optimized Defaults but this didn't help.

I've tried all the available PCI ports on my board except the one the graphics card is in (PCI-E port 1 of 3) but the Asus manual states that this card will see no benefit at all from being in anything faster than a 4x port, so this should be fine.

Am I missing a step here? Do I need to enable on-board AHCI to get this to work or can I leave on-board SATA as regular old IDE?
 
Ok, first thing I would probably do is look for a BIOS update for your motherboard. Motherboard BIOS updates often fix support for additional RAID expansion cards, and this is a similar sort of thing.

Secondly, your onboard SATA no longer has anything to do with the U3S6 card once your SSD is connected to it - if you have a IDE Optical drive, you could even disable the controller in the motherboard BIOS. The external card has its own SATA3 controller built into it (AFAIK), and thus operates the drives and talks over to the PCI-E bus itself.

Essentially, you are now running an external expansion card, similar to what I have with my own PERC5 card that runs my RAID10 Disk setup.

What you may have to do is set motherboard options to allow the capture of Interrupt 19 within the motherboard BIOS, allowing the controller to present itself and a bootable drive to your motherboard.

Other than that, keep an eye on both the Asus and Gigabyte forums for a potential solution.
 
ta for the info arthalen

yikes... want to avoid flashing BIOS if possible, for warranty purposes. it's also my only workstation so if it goes down them i'm in a mess.

i have a whole bunch of SATA2 HDDs which will all need to stay connected to the on-board SATA2 controller, so i guess I can't disable that for obvious reasons. the new SATA600 controller only has 2 ports.

I'm not sure what this Interrupt 19 is. The SSD is actually detected by the new controller, so I'm not sure what the issue is.

Time to head to the Asus forums I think.

Cheers,
 
well... success!

i successfully managed to flash my BIOS to the latest (F12) and suddenly the SATA600 controller started working and BAM I'm in windows running at SATA600 at last!

Wanna know something interesting? After flashing the BIOS if I left my Steelseries XAI mouse plugged in the machine would just restart constantly and wouldn't even get into the BIOS setup screen... weird eh? Had to unplug it to get it to work.

Right, time to plug everything back in and do some benchies on this C300!

Cheers for your help fellas!
 
C300_SATA600.png
 
Thats really impressive read speeds for a single drive SSD :D

Your right in that write speeds are comparitively slow, but tbh I wouldn't worry too much - remember, you can only write/install apps/games/files as fast as your source is - from a DVD-RW you'll be lucky to see 30MB/s!

Over a Gb network you'll only see upto 125MB/s max (and most likely 80-90MB/s max).
 
it's more for writing work files such as large PSD files (photoshop) etc. i'm finding that it's better for me to copy my PSD to my C300, work on it off that, then when I'm done copy it back to the other (mech) HDD. seems a shame to be getting such low speeds for what it cost....

that said, yeh, the read speeds are ace!
 
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