For the sake of pushing an old machine a little further, i decided to connect an SSD. But the performance is limited to Sata 1, eventhough the board supports Sata II and i know other users have pulled off Sata II speeds (amongst others, with a modified AHCI driver, therefore i was hoping somebody here knows how to fix this).
Machine info:
ASUS A8R32 MVP Deluxe
Dual core Opteron 180
Windows 7 X64
Latest available modded bios and set to AHCI
Samsung SSD 850 EVO
This motherboard has two Sata II controllers;
- The ULi M5228 (which is a modified M1575)
- Silicon Image 3132
Both controllers give a performance of ~100 mbps with the SSD. When i install the Standard AHCI Controller driver by MS, performance increases to around ~125 mbps. The bad things about the MS driver is that is sometimes stalls search queries on the drive (haven’t figured out exactly when).
Samsung Magician reports that the SSD is connected to a Sata 1.5 GB port when using the MS driver, but reports it as connected to Sata 3 GB port when using the ULi driver.
On the Asus VIP Forum somebody managed to improve the ULi driver by changing the BusType from Raid to Sata and Enable Force Unit Access support. Read about it here (last post): Asus VIP Forum. However, this modded driver gives me the regular ~100 mbps. I’ve also tried lots of other ULi drivers and modding them in various ways, but nothing provided results.
Any thoughts on how to improve performance?