odinlives
July 23rd, 2011, 07:43 AM
Ok guys and gals today I am going to show you how to properly setup your SSD and get to the advertised read and write speed of your SSD. I recently purchased two OCZ agility 3 hard drives and took them back due to them not getting even close to the correct read and write speeds. I ended up getting a Crucial M4 but was still not getting the proper speeds so I did some searching and finally figured it out on my own with different information on the net and took the time to put together this tutorial to help out anyone that wants to have lightning fast speeds with their SSD's.
I use AS SSD to benchmark my SSD which can be found here for free:
http://www.alex-is.de/PHP/fusion/downloads.php?cat_id=4&download_id=9
The first thing you are going to have to do is open up "regedit" by going to the start menu and typing regedit and hit enter. If you have user account control turned on you are going to need to right click and run as administrator.
In Registry Editor click on HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services and scroll all the way down to the folder called "msahci" and then right click on the icon called "start" in the right hand pane and choose modify.
If you are not familiar with editing the registry you can download this fixit tool from MS:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976
Here we are going to set the Value data to "0" and click ok like the picture below:
http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c124/sober4today/SSD%20Tutorial/SSDtutorial.png
Next thing you need to do is reboot your computer and enter the bios and enable "AHCI"
Upon first boot in Windows 7 it will load AHCI drivers for each present drive and then you will need to reboot once more.
After that you will be getting the proper "Read and Write" speeds for you new shiny SSD.
Please see the below to screenshots and check out the 232 point difference in the benchmark.
Also please note that each time you see red as in the picture below that says "pciide - BAD" in anyones benchmark results it means that they have not properly setup their SSD. As you can see by the bottom benchmark it is now stating "msahci - OK" and it is green for good reason.
Before:
http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c124/sober4today/SSD%20Tutorial/m4benchtutorial.png
After:
http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c124/sober4today/SSD%20Tutorial/ahcienabledtutorial.png
I use AS SSD to benchmark my SSD which can be found here for free:
http://www.alex-is.de/PHP/fusion/downloads.php?cat_id=4&download_id=9
The first thing you are going to have to do is open up "regedit" by going to the start menu and typing regedit and hit enter. If you have user account control turned on you are going to need to right click and run as administrator.
In Registry Editor click on HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services and scroll all the way down to the folder called "msahci" and then right click on the icon called "start" in the right hand pane and choose modify.
If you are not familiar with editing the registry you can download this fixit tool from MS:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976
Here we are going to set the Value data to "0" and click ok like the picture below:
http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c124/sober4today/SSD%20Tutorial/SSDtutorial.png
Next thing you need to do is reboot your computer and enter the bios and enable "AHCI"
Upon first boot in Windows 7 it will load AHCI drivers for each present drive and then you will need to reboot once more.
After that you will be getting the proper "Read and Write" speeds for you new shiny SSD.
Please see the below to screenshots and check out the 232 point difference in the benchmark.
Also please note that each time you see red as in the picture below that says "pciide - BAD" in anyones benchmark results it means that they have not properly setup their SSD. As you can see by the bottom benchmark it is now stating "msahci - OK" and it is green for good reason.
Before:
http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c124/sober4today/SSD%20Tutorial/m4benchtutorial.png
After:
http://i26.photobucket.com/albums/c124/sober4today/SSD%20Tutorial/ahcienabledtutorial.png