Avoid AMD AHCI SATA driver at all costs for older systems, bad io/slow drive speeds

http://forums.anandtech.com/archive/index.php/t-2083024.html

http://rog.asus.com/forum/showthread.php?12882-AMD-AHCI-vs-MS-AHCI-SSD-Testing

Seems they never fixed it for the 7xx and perhaps other southbridge amd chipset boards.  Found out the hard way when upgrading an older amd system with a readycache.  You think you are doing some good by installing windows and adding amd sata ahci drivers, but it only makes the performances abysmal, so just use the windows 7 default microsoft driver for best performance.

This doesn’t apply to modern boards, they finally fixed it in later chipsets.

Just a heads up for anyone facing the same problem.

Esp since the catalyst chipset driver package on amd’s site will install those drivers, so don’t take the shortcut, use chipset drivers from the motherboard makers site,and justs skip the sata drivers.  Amd’s pretty bad with drivers to the point where they put out a beta gpu driver which for no good reason came with broken chipset drivers which broke peoples ahci sata driver setup, leading to failure to boot issues.  System breaking betas, there are threads on the trouble that caused…

Probably only applies to sata 3gbps boards.

The sooner we move to NVMe the better!
Windows 8 already has native support for it.

While Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI) interface has the benefit of legacy software compatibility, it does not deliver optimal performance when an SSD is connected via PCI Express bus. This is because AHCI was developed back at the time when the purpose of a host bus adapter (HBA) in a system was to connect the CPU/memory subsystem with a much slower storage subsystem based on rotating magnetic media. Such an interface has some inherent inefficiencies when applied to SSD devices, which behave much more like DRAM than like spinning media.[1]

NVMe has been designed from the ground up, capitalizing on the low latency and parallelism of PCI Express SSDs, and fulfilling the parallelism of contemporary CPUs, platforms and applications. At a high level, the basic advantages of NVMe over AHCI relate to its ability to exploit parallelism in host hardware and software, manifested by differences in depth of command queues, interrupts processing, the number of uncacheable register accesses etc., resulting in various performance improvement

Try enabling DirectGMA with maximum GPU Aperture in Amd catalyst control center. It does not only make the graphics card faster but allowed me to get up to the maximum 560mb/s read speed for my ssd! 

The faster the platter spins, the faster an HDD can perform. Typical laptop  drives  today spin at either 5400 RPM (Revolutions per Minute) or 7200RPM, though some server-based platters spin at up to 15,000 RPM! The major advantage of an HDD is that it is capable of storing lots of data cheaply.

AMD continues update drivers. To get them, you have to go to the AMD site ( https://www.amd.com/), discover the driver comparing with your particular kind of Windows adaptation (for instance, Windows 32 bit) and download the driver physically.
Once you’ve downloaded the right amd sata controller driver for your system, double tap on the downloaded record and take after the on-screen guidelines to introduce the driver.

@gimespace wrote:

Try enabling DirectGMA with maximum GPU Aperture in Amd catalyst control center. It does not only make the graphics card faster but allowed me to get up to the maximum 560mb/s read speed for my ssd! 

Seems they never fixed it for the 7xx and perhaps other southbridge amd chipset boards.  Found out the hard way when upgrading an older amd system with a readycache.  You think you are doing some good by installing windows and adding amd sata ahci drivers, but it only makes the performances abysmal, so just use the windows 7 default microsoft driver for best performance.

@iliyatsia wrote:


@gimespace wrote:

Try enabling DirectGMA with maximum [FileZilla Malwarebytes Rufus](FileZilla Malwarebytes Rufus) GPU Aperture in Amd catalyst control center. It does not only make the graphics card faster but allowed me to get up to the maximum 560mb/s read speed for my ssd! 


Seems they never fixed it for the 7xx and perhaps other southbridge amd chipset boards.  Found out the hard way when upgrading an older amd system with a readycache.  You think you are doing some good by installing windows and adding amd sata ahci drivers, but it only makes the performances abysmal, so just use the windows 7 default microsoft driver for best performance.