Asus P7P55D-E PRO with Samsung 850 EVO, Win 7 64b

Important Drivers General: Storage Drivers (AHCI/RAID, NVMe and USB)
1

Hello,
I have been using 128 GB Kingston V+ ssd with my Asus P7P55D-E PRO on Marvell SATA3 ports with driver from Marvell, since 2010.

Now I have bought 250 GB Samsung 850 EVO ssd - assuming that I will plug it as same, using last drivers available on Asus website. But when starting to search more about TRIM support, I just found all the topics about TRIM not supported with Marvell controller and/or Microsoft driver required for Intel controllers. With Kingston during last 4 years, I didnt notice any decrease of speed, but honestly I was not even searching for any, since I was expecting TRIM works fine;-)

I just made few tests with CrystalDiskMark with Samsung ssd, and sequential read is going up to 320 on SATA3 (Marvell) ports, while when plugged into SATA2 (Intel) it is arround 270, but Write speeds are much higher. Im getting 35MB Read/68MB Write for 4K-read on SATA2 port.

Please, I would appreciate any advice on which ports and with which driver is the best to use this Samsung drive on my Asus mobo? I would like to have TRIM working, of course.

Windows 7 64b, no RAID needed, mobo BIOS 1602 (I have AHCI enabled)

Thank you!
DanKm

2

@ DanKm:
Welcome at Win-RAID Forum!

TRIM support is not the main problem, because you will get TRIM activity within your SSD whichever SATA port of your mainboard you are using as long as you are running the MS AHCI driver.
So the more exact question is, which SATA Controller and which AHCI driver may give your system drive the best performace and stability without loosing the TRIM support.
You may try different conbinations, but this would be my favorite one:

  • SATA port for the OS: Intel (first port)
    Reasons:
    1. According to my experience the Intel SATA ports are better than all the other ones.
    2. The Intel SATA2 ports may even give you a better performance than the Marvell SATA3 ports, because they are part of your mainboard chipset.
  • AHCI driver: Intel RST(e) v12.9.4.1000 WHQL
    Reason: This Intel AHCI driver is the last one, which natively supports the P55 Chipset of your mainboard. So you can expect, that there are not many bugs left by Intel.

Have fun with your new SSD!
Fernando

3

Hello Fernando, thank you very much for your answer - so prompt answer!

Yes, I will follow your suggestion. To use SATA2 ports is what I was thinking more and more as well - because seq. read is the only advantage I see with Marvell - and this is not the most often operationg case, and 4KB read/write are better with Intel SATA2. Moreover my mobo onboard solution does not give full SATA3 speeds anyway…

I have already installed Win on Samsung drive - do I need to reinstal it? I think not, just update driver to v12.9 should be ok I think, right?

Btw. what about my 4 years old Kingston SSD - I would like to use it still as non-system drive. How can I make it "trimmed" now? If I just plug it to some Intel SATA2 port - it will do the trim job? I didnt notice some utility from Kingston to do drive "refresh".:frowning:

Thank you in advance!
DanKm

4

Yes, that is ok. I recommend to just install the driver from within the Device Manager and not to install the RST software.

Yes!

5

Hello,
after some years Im just upgrading same config. to Win 10 Pro with "clean" Win installation on a new SSD Samsung 860 EVO 1TB. I would like then kindly ask you please, which driver to install - if it would be again fine also with •AHCI driver: Intel RST(e) v12.9.4.1000 WHQL or if you would recommend me anything else. I wont use any raid, just simple AHCI. Thank you very much!