New SSD in Compaq CQ60: UDMA6, limited speed

[Behemot]

I got this laptop with bloated system and HDD with increasing numbers of bad secors right at the OS backup partition so I recommended SSD for the owner right away as there is Vista licence only.

So I got this A-DATA SX900 128GB SSD and installed fresh Vista 64. But what the heck, it is running as UDMA6 and limited to 110 MB/s only! Any idea? There is Nvidia MCP77MV or nForce 730/GeForce 8200 chipset supporting SATA-300 drives. IIRC, nForce starting with nForce 4 already incorporated AHCI stuff even while not running in AHCI directly. Supposedly, AHCI is turned on in this laptop but there is (as usually) NOTHING to be set in BIOS. I tried reinstalling the drivers and uninstalling channels, nothing.

It is also strange it actually detects IDE primary/secondary which should not be possible…

 

[TRWOV]

I suppose the bios is locked in IDE mode from the factory.

 

[Behemot]

Is it even possible? All nForce I have seen all the way to nForce 4 always had only "normal" (which incorporated all that high sped, NCQ, hot-plug stuff) and RAID setting. There was never possible to turn on IDE imitation with speed limit.

Update: I am testing an ASUS M2N32 SLI Deluxe here so I stuck it in. Exactly the same situation. So either it has poor compatibiltiy with nFroce chipsets in general, or there is some serious problem with this piece. In any case, I am taking it with me to my AMD 890FX system to try there.

 

[newtekie1]

Eitherway, even at 110Mbps, the SSD will feel a lot faster than an HDD thanks to the ~0ms latency.

 

[Behemot]

Not really. Opening a few things at the same moment is terrible pain in ass, something which does not happen with 15k SCSi drives in my desktop.

 

[newtekie1]

Yeah, but that could just be because the laptop has terrible specs. I mean, if you are still running the original 2GB of RAM, adding an SSD isn't going to help performance any, there isn't enough RAM in the machine.

 

[FX-GMC]

Yeah, but that could just be because the laptop has terrible specs. I mean, if you are still running the original 2GB of RAM, adding an SSD isn't going to help performance any, there isn't enough RAM in the machine.

Agreed. Vista or 7 can and will choke with only 2GB of ram.

 

[Behemot]

It has 4 gigs already. Some guy was able to get over 200 MB/s with 2 generations older SSD here http://alienbabeltech.com/main/the-notebook-makeover-kingston-ssdram-upgrade-and-clean-os-install/4/ so it HAS to work.

I tried messing with the SSD on the ASUS MB, even using RAID configuration, but it seems this chipset does not really support more than some modified version of IDE emulation. But I will try modified drivers from http://www.win-raid.com/t15f37-NVIDIA-Optimized-nForce-Driverpacks-for-Vista-Win.html on the laptop, it has MCP77V which should support AHCI.

 

[OneMoar]

what is the full model of the laptop there is literally 4 versions of the CQ60

 

[Behemot]

Laptop is CQ60-440EC (4 GB, QL-65).

I have also tried the SSD on SiL 3132, no change (does not support AHCI obviously), some another ASUS board with nForce 680, but that's some OEM board so there is no setting (thus I expect IDE by factory even though this SB finally supports AHCI). Now finally on AMD SB850 it is running on full SATA-300 speed. Well, even more actually, HD Tune was oscillating around 340 MB/s. Seems that nForce are accursed…