So, I'm exchanging PMs with ChrisK about the ALive Dual.
Here's what he wrote:
By the way, I looked up what the problem with the SATA ports on the ASRock was.
The chipset's own ports only do SATA-I. That works, i.e. 130..140MB/s run through there, but they were not hotplug capable. For an eSata port (yes, there are people who use something like that 😁) so unfortunately unsuitable. The separate SATA-II ports are hotpluggable. The thing is, that except an old Samsung SSD470 SSD all newer SSDs (Samsung and Sandisk) run only in SATA-I mode. I don't know why. I have tried all possible driver versions and finally also different SATA cables, but always only SATA-I worked. Therefore the data rates are only ~140MB/s max.
The funny thing is that the Samsung SSD Magician even says that SATA-II is available. Only how to activate it remains a mystery.
Translated from Krautish to English by the awesome DeepL algorythm.
I'm currently testing my ALive Dual which I acquired recently and ran into the same problem.
My Samsung SSDs (830 + 840. Don't have any other SSDs.) also get detected as SATA-I and max out at 140MB/s. So it's not a defect on ChrisK's board.
Does anyone have an idea how we might solve this issue?
Older sata chipsets quite often have broken auto-negotiation, which results in newer sata3 drives falling back to sata1 or sometimes even not working at all. Unless disks support jumpering to sata2 (which is extremely rare, if there is a jumper it's usually to force sata1 for even older chipsets) nothing can be done. AFAIK ALive Dual use JMicron JMB363 (or some other derivative of JMB36x), which is notoriously finnicky and usually only works in sata2 with original sata2 drives.
Older sata chipsets quite often have broken auto-negotiation, which results in newer sata3 drives falling back to sata1 or sometimes even not working at all. Unless disks support jumpering to sata2 (which is extremely rare, if there is a jumper it's usually to force sata1 for even older chipsets) nothing can be done. AFAIK ALive Dual use JMicron JMB363 (or some other derivative of JMB36x), which is notoriously finnicky and usually only works in sata2 with original sata2 drives.
Damn it. But thanks for the clarification.
Using a PCIe controller card isn't possible, because I can't use AGP and PCIe at the same time. And PCI is even slower than SATA1.
But I could use two 2TB SSDs (once they become affordable in a few years) in RAID on the SATA1 slots for games and a 256GB SATA2 SSD for Windows. 😁
Do you know any SSDs which can be jumpered to SATA2? Would be glad about any hints.
RaiderOfLostVoodoowrote on 2022-02-17, 09:14:Damn it. But thanks for the clarification.
Using a PCIe controller card isn't possible, because I can't use AGP and PCIe at the […] Show full quote
Older sata chipsets quite often have broken auto-negotiation, which results in newer sata3 drives falling back to sata1 or sometimes even not working at all. Unless disks support jumpering to sata2 (which is extremely rare, if there is a jumper it's usually to force sata1 for even older chipsets) nothing can be done. AFAIK ALive Dual use JMicron JMB363 (or some other derivative of JMB36x), which is notoriously finnicky and usually only works in sata2 with original sata2 drives.
Damn it. But thanks for the clarification.
Using a PCIe controller card isn't possible, because I can't use AGP and PCIe at the same time. And PCI is even slower than SATA1.
But I could use two 2TB SSDs (once they become affordable in a few years) in RAID on the SATA1 slots for games and a 256GB SATA2 SSD for Windows. 😁
Do you know any SSDs which can be jumpered to SATA2? Would be glad about any hints.
Unfortunately I don't know of any. By the time SSDs became more common SATA was already old and manufacturers didn't really care about broken implementations of early controllers. Even on HDDs sata2 jumpers were rare - I've only ever seen one HDD with sata2 jumper setting, most come with sata1 jumper.
Some HDDs allowed to limit speed via firmware or via manufacturer's tool but again, I don't know of any SSD capable of that.
I wouldn't really worry about it though - slightly faster OS drive + slightly slower data drives will be more than enough for a dated system. On the plus side you can buy cheaper, slower ssds 😀
AFAIK ALive Dual use JMicron JMB363 (or some other derivative of JMB36x), which is notoriously finnicky and usually only works in sata2 with original sata2 drives.
Using a PCIe controller card isn't possible, because I can't use AGP and PCIe at the same time. And PCI is even slower than SATA1.
But I could use two 2TB SSDs (once they become affordable in a few years) in RAID on the SATA1 slots for games and a 256GB SATA2 SSD for Windows. 😁
Is TRIM dependent on the SATA-controller? Not a operating system thing?
Does anyone know of / have a PCIe-SATA card with this JMicron JMB363? Would like to know if this would be able to drive a common SSD with SATA-II speed. Then it could be a firmware thing within the mainboard BIOS.
The result looks rather poor, even for SATA-I. I ask myself whether a SSD connected to the SATA-I port of the nForce3-250 southbridge might be faster.
@ChrisK: Do you have benchmark results of the Samsung 470 SSD on the AliveDual-eSata2 for comparison?
If it turns out that the performance is better than the benchmark I found patching a new JMicron BIOS into the AliveDual-eSata2 might be worth trying. (I haven't done this before, but I'm not afraid since I have an external programmer.)
The result looks rather poor, even for SATA-I. I ask myself whether a SSD connected to the SATA-I port of the nForce3-250 southbridge might be faster.
@ChrisK: Do you have benchmark results of the Samsung 470 SSD on the AliveDual-eSata2 for comparison?
He did. 190MB/s he said.
Also noteworthy: The two SATA2 ports seem to share bandwith.
On the SATA1 ports I measured 130-140MB/s with CrystalDisk. That would be 260-280MB/s in RAID.
I had another idea:
- Samsung 470 256GB on 1st SATA2 port
- Hotswap on 2nd SATA2 port
- 2x 2TB SSD RAID on the SATA1 ports
- DVD drive on IDE
- 3 more 2TB drives on the IDE ports via adapter
- add a floppy drive for additional retro feels during boot
In the 2030s we will probably be able to purchase 2TBs SSDs for less than 50 bucks. The SSDs on the IDE ports could be used to swap games, which you don't intend to play in the near future. So you don't have to uninstall/reinstall. Just swap it back to the RAID array if necessary. 😁
Also noteworthy: The two SATA2 ports seem to share bandwith.
The JMicron controller also hangs off PCIE 1.0 bus at 1x speed which limits it to around 2.5GT/s total which in turn translates to around 2Gbit/s of useful bandwidth.
It's more of a SATA "not quite 2" controller 😀
Also noteworthy: The two SATA2 ports seem to share bandwith.
The JMicron controller also hangs off PCIE 1.0 bus at 1x speed which limits it to around 2.5GT/s total which in turn translates to around 2Gbit/s of useful bandwidth.
It's more of a SATA "not quite 2" controller 😀
That's correct. The two SATA-ports of the JMB363 share one PCIe v1.0 x1 lane.
My old benchmarks say you can get around 190MB/s with a Samsung SSD470 128GB which runs at SATA-II. That's also the theoretical maximum for PCIe x1.
All newer SSDs I tested (Samsung 840/850/Sandisk X300s) only run at SATA-I with ~140MB/s max. That is also the maximum which can be achived when connecting the SSDs to the nForce SATA-ports.
I thought about what another native SATA-II SSD would behave like? I wouldn't wonder if it would also run at SATA-II just like the Samsung 470 (which is SATA-II).
Unfortunately I only have SATA-III SSDs besides the one 470.
...
- 3 more 2TB drives on the IDE ports via adapter
Of course I have benchmarks for this 😉
With some SSD connected via a SATA to IDE adaptor (I have some JMicron one 🤫) you can reach 80-90MB/s on the IDE ports (one drive tested at a time).
I found a cheap JMicron JMB363 card on Ebay (12.99 Euro) and just bought it in order to give it a try. I'll keep you up to date whether this works.
The ALiveDual-eSATA2 already supports AHCI mode. Selectable in BIOS. I also feel to remember the Samung Magician tells that TRIM is active (have to check to be sure). So I'm not sure if a firmware upgrade would improve that much.
I'm also using the stock Windows drivers as they have shown to be the fastest. All JMicron driver versions I tested just decreased performance.
I'm currently testing my ALive Dual which I acquired recently and ran into the same problem.
My Samsung SSDs (830 + 840. Don't have any other SSDs.) also get detected as SATA-I and max out at 140MB/s. So it's not a defect on ChrisK's board.
By sheer coincidence, I had started to test the very same motherboard with a SATA-III SSD and found the same problem.
At first, I expected it to be either a faulty SSD or a setting that need to be changed on either the disk or in the BIOS.
Imagine my surprise when I found your post from just some weeks before.
Using a PCIe controller card isn't possible, because I can't use AGP and PCIe at the same time. And PCI is even slower than SATA1.
Hmm, I didn't have this issue. My PCI-E slot has a USB 3.0 hub installed, and my AGP has either an GeForce 6200 or 7800GS installed. Both work fine simultaneously.
I found a cheap JMicron JMB363 card on Ebay (12.99 Euro) and just bought it in order to give it a try. I'll keep you up to date whether this works.
Did you manage to do this?
I can confirm this is a SATA-III SSD issue with the JMicron JMB363 controller, as I normally have 2 WD Green 2TB conventional disks on these ports and they reach maximum SATA-300 read/write speeds.
I've conducted the following tests with CrystalDiskMark. I ran 3 rounds for each category to determine an average measurement.
The results consist of a Sandisk X110 on both the nForce3 250 SATA-I and JMicron JMB363 SATA-II controllers (tested in both IDE and AHCI mode via the setting in BIOS).
The AHCI and IDE tests should be no different as the setting in the BIOS is to allow disks to be hot-pluggable or not.
Next week, I will be able to test again with an Intel SSDSA2M160G2GC 160GB SATA II 3Gb/s. Hopefully, the results will be better than the Sandisk x110, and similar or better to those of the Samsung 470 series.
SATA-II speeds for sequential reads are immediately up, well past the limits reached by the Sandisk x110, peaking around 177Mb/s.
However, all write speeds and 4k reads are down in comparison to the Sandisk x110 connected to a SATA-I port.
Contradictory to what @ChrisK found, the JMicron drivers performed much faster than the stock Windows drivers (Vista SP2).
Sequential read speeds are almost reaching the theoretical limit of 190Mb/s for this board.
4k writes are 3x faster than those on the Vista driver.
Not a bad performance increase for a SATA-II SSD that cost less than 10 EUR.
Based on the results, it appears that a native SATA-II drive will have performance increases.
However, given the age of such drives, some of the SATA-III drives may be competitive to native SATA-II drives, even at SATA-I speeds.
I found a cheap JMicron JMB363 card on Ebay (12.99 Euro) and just bought it in order to give it a try. I'll keep you up to date whether this works.
Did you manage to do this?
I managed to do the tests with the card from Ebay and a Samsung 830 Series SSD with 128 GB (SATA-III drive which can do 520 MB/s read and 320 MB/s write according to datasheet). I'll append three screenshots with:
- Stock ROM v1.03 which was on the card when it arrived.
- Last official ROM v1.07.24 from the JMicron FTP server (https://archive.org/details/ftp-driver.jmicron.com.tw).
- Mod-ROM v1.08.01 from https://www.computerbase.de/forum/threads/inf … jmb363.1997792/ (Do not use the first mod-ROM from JMB363 mod BIOS.zip, this one is broken!!! Rather take jm363new.zip)
I did 5 tests in order to get a good average. I noticed that the date displayed by the mod-ROM looks a little bit weird. It says "Copyright(C) 2005-2009" while the last official ROM with a lower revision number says "Copyright(C) 2005-2010".