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SATA III drive - breaks SATA II AHCI on nForce4 - reverts to SATA 150 MB/s - possible workaround?

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First post, by simbin

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SATA III drive - breaks SATA II AHCI on nForce4 - reverts to SATA 150 MB/s - possible workaround?
*Windows XP*

Trying to get SATA II AHCI working on my Abit KN8 SLI (nForce4), but the SATA III SSD I'm using causes a bug with the nForce drivers and reverts to 150 MB/s - or so the story goes. There aren't any settings for AHCI in the BIOS. But apparently, it will work at proper speeds under Windows Vista onward, using Generic Microsoft AHCI drivers. Of course, the goal of this build is to stay on Windows XP.

I could get a PCIe SATA controller, but that sort of feels like cheating. My PCIe is capped at 1.0x anyway.

UniATA seems promising, but I haven't been able to make it work.

Has anyone ran into this before and come out victorious? The internet is full of people saying to upgrade, and I want make this work even more, because of them 🤣

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Reply 2 of 3, by gerwin

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(Rant Warning 🤣 )
I am reluctant to fix computers for just anyone since long ago, but made an exception for an aunt with a laptop that was obviously out of disk space, or rather out of C: space. Laptop being an Asus X5DI-D from 2009 with Windows 7.

Seemed to me like a wise thing to ditch the slow 2,5" drive ASAP and put in a Crucial MX300 SSD. And at first it actually seemed OK.
But soon it started to misbehave: The Nforce chipset gets real ugly trying to negotiate with such a SATA 3 drive. System Freezes when transferring files. The evenviewer log full of 'nvstor64' errors.
-Tried the latest drivers from 2010/2011: Still bad.
-Tried older drivers from 2009: Still bad.
-Disabled Queing in the driver settings: Still bad.
-Tried compatible Interfacing in BIOS (IDE mode): Still bad!?
-Tried the MS SATA driver: Windows no longer boots, not even in safe mode. As usual the Windows system restore wizards fail to see that driver change causing it, and don't give me a way to revert.

Conclusion: Reinstalled original Mechanical drive, and had to do all cleaning-up + updating again, on an annoyingly sluggish system. But at least: it works.

Nvidia sure knew how to get laptops to their End of Life. With this and their period of GPU solder issues.

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Reply 3 of 3, by Mangegrain

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Hello.

nForce drivers totally suck with SATA drives and AHCI, TRIM, NCQ... support

But so far I had good success with SSDs and Windows 7 on older nForce3 and nForce4 systems in IDE or SATA-IDE mode (so no AHCI support in these BIOSes) and MS IDE drivers (with SAT "ATA pass-through" mode).

I have a Samsung EVO 860 SATA III high-end SSD connected to a SATA I port in a nForce4 system
I have a Dogfish mSATA cheap SSD connected to a PATA to mSATA bridge, in a nForce3 notebook.
Both perform correctly with TRIM support. The Samsung also has NCQ support.

Using a SCSI software layer, the Windows controller driver is able to negociate directly with the drive, and discover and use its TRIM, NCQ... functions. This was primarily implemented to easily support disks connected to usb bridges... Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI_/_ATA_Translation

It's maybe not as straightforward and effective as a genuine AHCI mode, but it works, as long as every node in the OS-to-drive chain is ATA pass-through compatible.

* my SSDs are ATA pass-through compatible ;
* nForce3/4 controllers are ATA pass-through compatible ;
* nForce Drivers are NOT ATA pass-through compatible ! So no TRIM and NCQ support using them, and other problems as well... But...
* Microsoft standard drivers are ATA pass-through compatible, so...
* Windows 7 is able to discover the TRIM and NCQ functions featured by the SSDs and use them.

Performance is good, considering the SATA I / PATA hardwares limit SSD's max speeds. It's much better than with mechanical HDDs anyway. Of course it cannot be as fast as SATA III SSDs on SATA III ports.

Yet, Samsung Magician is not able to detect my Samsung 860 EVO SSD, because it finds no AHCI driver in the system.
But third party tools like CrystalDiskInfo, CrystalDiskMark, HDTune... are OK.

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