New M6500 Discussion Thread

I own a A-Data S599 with Sandforce controller. The first dataloss (the whole volume was gone) was three weeks after I installed it on resuming from hibernate. On Monday, three months later, it died completely. The BIOS doesn't recognize it anymore. Now I wait for an replacement.

Tuesday (in hope to find a way to get my files back) I found a new firmware on the A-Data homepage. Today (Thursday) it's removed.

Actually I can't recommend this SSD as a system volume (or at least you should make a full drive image on regular basis).

 

Uuh - that sounds like a bad experience.

 

I was lucky I made an image. Additional my personal data was on the secondary hdd. A good old reliable one with spinning plates...

Reading different forums the sandforce 1222 definitely has problems with hibernate and standby. It looks like some kind of power loss at the wrong time leading to useless data followed by a BSoD on power up. But i have no guess how this can lead to a ssd not detected by BIOS.

 

Hi --

Does anybody have any idea of the answer to the following question?

When I bought my refurbished M6500 it turns out it was set up in the BIOS for RAID. Now neither of my internal 256GB SSD drives is set up to use RAID, but I now want to do something that requires the BIOS to be placed in ACHI mode. If my drives aren't set up for RAID and I switch to ACHI, will it trash my disks and undo all of the work I've done over the past seveal weeks to make this a magnificent audo workstation? When I switch from RAID to ACHI in the BIOS a message appears warning me that this may happen. But is that only if I have actually set things up as RAID. Or will this happen in any event.

ANy thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

Mike

 

Hi Again --

I think I have the answer to my question above. Someone else was in the same boat and says he ended up having to reinstall Windows when he switched from RAID to AHCI. So now my question is, is there anyway I can save the image of my install and restore it once I've switched the drives to AHCI. Or could I at least preserve my registry and all the software install information contained therein?

I'm begining to have a pretty queasy feeling about this.

Regards.

Mike

 

Thank you.

and yes I was thinking in pins not pings. My mistake.

 

In short, no.

I have done this before. But it may depend on the system installation. So you are on the save side if you make an image using arconis true image or so.

Normally on boot windows will detect that you switched to AHCI and loads ist AHCI drivers instead of the intel raid drivers.

 

So.... has anyone had any luck using audio over displayport on nvidia cards lately? I'm beginning to wonder if something got screwed up in their drivers. Even reverted to the ones on Dell's site and cleaned out anything attributable to old versions to be sure... still no configured audio device. The drivers aren't even being installed from the Dell 257.29s (there is an HDAudio dir in the installer and nothing is ever pulled from it).

 

I know of a M6500 user with a 3800M on Win7 64bit who had problems with sound via DP-HDMI in january but could solve it by "uninstalling the new driver and reinstalling the old ISV driver". (whatever that means)

 

Hi --

Last night I was trying to switch the BIOS SATA setting over from RAID (which the refurbished M6500 I bought was configured with) to AHCI, which I need in order to do my latest project. As I mentioned in a previous message, neither of the internal SSD drives in my machine nor the 7200 RPM SATA drive I added in the optical bay were actually set up as RAID drives, but the SATA setting was still RAID.

I worked with an engineer at Dell and he had me download the Intel Matrix Storage driver, which I installed and was able to make the switch without having to reinstall my OS. But what I discovered in the process was that now, whether I boot with the BIOS set to AHCI or to RAID, the wonderful glitch-free audio performance I was experiencing in Cubase has now been compromised by intermittent disk activity. This is even when I pare down the services and the system startup components to the same small handful that let me achieve the good performance in my old configuration. I can only conclude that it is the Matrix Storage Driver that is contributing to this, since it is the significant thing that has changed before and after.

So now I'm backing everything up (all three of the drives listed above) to an external 2TB SATA drive I also had added and getting ready to uninstall the Matrix driver, which will guarantee to trash my disks, I've been told (But I really have no choice; now that I know glitch-free Firewire is possible on this machine, I cannot settle for anything less.) Once I have stuff backed up, I will uninstall the Matrix driver, which will cause me to have to reformat the drives and reinstall the operating system. THen, hopefully, I will restore the files and the registry and be back in business.

So here, finally, is my question. When I return to using the original SATA driver, is there any reason why I shouldn't set things up as AHCI, as I originally wanted to do. My uncertainty revolves around whether having a SATA BIOS setting of AHCI is in any way less performant than having a SATA BIOS setting of RAID? I guess I'm going to try it out regardless and simply install a minimal Cubase configuration to test once I have the OS installed. If I can't achieve the same levels of disk performance than I was seeing before, then I will switch to a RAID BIOS setting and do it all over again, if need be. But I am curious whether anybody out there knows if AHCI vs RAID setting has any performance implications.

Sorry for the long message and thanks for any input anyone can give.