ASUS Rampage IV Extreme: Intel vs ASMedia SATA

Oxonsi

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I have this motherboard with the 4802 BIOS revision. And I have three Intel 520 series SSDs and one WD VelociRaptor HDD.

I have two of the SSDs in RAID 0 attached to the red Intel SATA III ports, the WD HDD attached to a black Intel SATA II port, and the single SSD, which is my boot drive and Windows 7 system disk, attached to one of the red ASMedia SATA III ports.

This worked well enough, but I noticed that I was getting a lot of Atapi Event ID 11 errors, "The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort0" in the System logs.

In the meantime, I moved my boot SSD to one of the black Intel ports, and the Atapi ID 11 errors have gone away. But I believe the SATA II connection is limiting the speed I'm getting from that SSD.

So my question is if I should avoid the ASMedia ports, particularly for a boot SSD? I have read that the ASMedia controller on this board has some issues, and that it is slower than the corresponding Intel ports. I thought that a driver update might help with the ASMedia port, but when I tried to update the driver, I receive a message along the lines of Windows determined that my driver was already up-to-date. So is there away to get rid of the ID 11 errors on the ASMedia controller?

If the above is all correct, then probably my best option to get the most out of my SSDs is probably to invest in a RAID card, correct?

Thanks for any info.
 

mc962

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They generally tell you to use the intel ports for important boot drive stuff instead of the 3rd party asmedia controller. There should be plenty of intel ports on the board I think for all your drives
 

Oxonsi

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Thanks for your replies.

There are enough Intel SATA ports for all of my drives. I have them all on the Intel ports now. But only two of the Intel ports are SATA III, all of the rest are the slower SATA II type. Right now, I'm using the two SATA III ports for the SSDs in RAID 0, which leaves me with only SATA II ports for my boot SSD, and that limits the speed somewhat.

So would be nice to be able to use the ASMedia ports, which are both SATA III, but I don't think they support RAID, and I get ID 11 errors when I use it with my boot SSD.

I'll also contact ASUS support about this.

Thanks again.
 


You could also consider getting an SATA III add on card but be careful with them. The one I got would only do about 180MB/s and that was horrible. My SSD's do about 540MB/s on a real SATA III connection.
 

Oxonsi

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Wow, 180 MB/s is slow. I'm benchmarked the sequential read of my boot SSD off the Intel SATA II at about 280 MB/s, which isn't terrible, but I'm sure it can do better. I also benchmarked my SSDs in RAID 0 on the two Intel SATA III ports and I was getting just over 1,000 MB/s! So I'd guess a single SSD should be around 500 MB/s.

I'm thinking my best option might be to get a RAID card, and then put the two SSDs in RAID 0 on that. And then move my boot SSD to one of the Intel SATA III ports.

I think descent RAID cards probably start at about $200, so maybe it would be worth it.
 

mc962

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While I know SATA 3 would be the best for an SSD, does your ssd actually manage to max out sata 2? I've never had the issue of lack of needed ports so I never bothered to do the research if SSD these days are fast enough to go above the limits of SATA 2, but if current SSD don't quite manage to max out the sata 2, then you could probably manage to plug it in there if you wanted for the boot drive
 

Oxonsi

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Yes, I think my SSD maxes out the SATA II interface. I'm getting about 280 MB/s sequential reads, which is reported to be about the max for SATA II. I believe the SSD can do well over 400 MB/s on the native SATA III port. When I had it on the ASMedia SATA III, I think it was doing about 380 MB/s. The ASMedia SATA III is slower than the the native Intel ports, but still faster than the Intel SATA II. The main problem with it is the Atapi Event ID 11 errors I get on the ASMedia ports. They don't seem to cause any problem in daily usage, but are kind of a cause for concern...
 

mc962

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I think I know the answer, but I don't suppose the RAID drives can go in the Asmedia? Also, I believe that the asmedia comes with a driver so make sure you get that installed if it's there. I would still recommend putting the boot drive on the intel port, but the driver is a good thing to have
 

Oxonsi

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I received a response from ASUS: the ASMedia ports are for data HDD or SSD, not a boot drive. So the controller isn't really supposed to work with a boot drive.

And unfortunately the ASMedia ports also do not support hardware RAID. I guess I could attach the RAID 0 set to the ASMedia ports and do software RAID through Windows... But my best bet to get the maximum performance out of the drives is probably to get an add-on RAID card.

Thanks for all your thoughts!