Asrock Z68 Extreme4 and Windows 8 Release Preview

[pisiiki]

Hello, I have noticed that the sata performance under win8 is very poor. I have the beta 2.05 bios and I was using a 60GB SSD as cache. It doesn't make any difference with regular IDE mode. In fact I have switched to IDE because my system freezed from time to time with the sata controller in raid mode.

I hope that Asrock is working on a bios with the intel raid firmware updated, this motherboard is just a year old and there are not any stable updates for the bios since 2011.

[odiebugs]

Must be your setup, because with RP win 8, an win 7 are the same at file transfer. No matter what an OS is, it can't make any hardware work faster then what the hardware is rated at. With CP win 8, win 7 was faster, but that because it was too early.

The only time you put the controller into RAID is if you have two or more identical drives and intend on using RAID.

When a SSD is placed on the system it is supposed to be put on AHCI. What ever port is being used needs to be set to AHCI, and the AHCI drivers need to be pre installed before the OS.

Read the MOBO manual and make sure the correct pre installed drivers are installed.

[pisiiki]

Must be your setup, because with RP win 8, an win 7 are the same at file transfer. No matter what an OS is, it can't make any hardware work faster then what the hardware is rated at. With CP win 8, win 7 was faster, but that because it was too early.

The only time you put the controller into RAID is if you have two or more identical drives and intend on using RAID.

When a SSD is placed on the system it is supposed to be put on AHCI. What ever port is being used needs to be set to AHCI, and the AHCI drivers need to be pre installed before the OS.

Read the MOBO manual and make sure the correct pre installed drivers are installed.

Well I have win7 x64 and win8 x86 and win8 is freezing all the time, it is not the intel raid drivers as I suposed, I have used the marvell controller and it freezes too. I have all the drivers installed that assrock pass with the beta bios. The system also freezed or crashed randomly with the default windows drivers.

Win7 works perfectly.

[parsec]

Since you were using a caching SSD, and the Intel SRT software (I assume) you needed to be in RAID mode for that to work, so that is not a mistake or the cause of your problem. You can't use the Intel SRT software with a caching SSD in AHCI mode, so don't try that. What SSD are you using as the cache drive?

The setup for SRT is important, and must be done correctly, such as being in RAID mode, and creating a partition of the correct size on the SSD. Of course you loose the caching feature as soon as you changed to IDE mode, so you are just using your HDD as the OS drive now.

I run Win 8 RP, and it's SATA performance is a bit slower than Win 7, but the drivers are not complete, as is Win 8 itself. It sounds to me like you had problems with your SSD caching drive (freezing), but changing to IDE mode without installing an OS on the SSD means you are just using the HDD alone as your OS drive.

Don't try the Marvell chipset, it's worse stability-wise than the Intel chipset, plus you can't use SRT on the Marvell chipset. You need to describe your PC better, such as the SSD, HDD, and where the OS is installed, and if you still want to use SSD caching.

[pisiiki]

Thanks for your help, I will describe in detail what is going on.

My system is unstable no matter how I configure the storage. I am now with a regular HDD in IDE with the intel controller. When I use firefox or chome and java I have no idea why but the system freezes. Otherwise it freezes randomly every 24/48 hours. I thought it was related with disc access because the problem starts with a system not being able to read/write to the disc, after some seconds the system ui becomes unresponsive, then the mouse cursor stops working and then you must reset it.

My performance with intel SRT was not a bit slower, it was sligthly faster than using the HDD alone. I enabled it with the intel sofware in maximized mode, it was theoretically working but no idea.

I have tested with the SSD unpluged too, same problem. I wonder what is the difference between your system and mine, I installed windows 8 in a clean HDD drive with RAID mode enabled, then I installed all the drivers. Then I enabled SRT.

Sometimes it crashes to a BlueScreen with something about DPC_WATCHDOG_VIOLATION when I make heavy storage use (like passing an AV full scan).

My system:

Asrock Z68 Extreme4 - Bios 2.05
Intel i7 2600K
2x4GB 1600 G-Skill Ripjaws DDR3 @ 1.6v
nVidia Geforce 560Ti

1.5TB HDD
60GB Corsair Force GT SSD
usb external BD-Drive

Regards.