Where Customization Begins 

  • How To Correctly Setup Your SSD and edit the Registry

  • Many Other Tutorials That Don't Belong In Any Of The Above Sections Here.
Many Other Tutorials That Don't Belong In Any Of The Above Sections Here.
 #18126  by odinlives
 18 Jul 2011, 23:33
Ok guys today I am going to show you how to properly setup your SSD and get to the advertised read and write speed of your SSD. I recently purchased and two OCZ agility 3 hard drives and took them back due to them not getting even close to the correct read and write speeds. I ended up getting a Crucial M4 but was still not getting the proper speeds so I did some searching and finally figured it out on my own with different information on the net and took the time to put together this tutorial to help out anyone that wants to have lightning fast speeds with their SSD's.

The first thing you are going to have to do is open up "regedit" by going to the start menu and typing regedit and hit enter. If you have user account control turned on you are going to need to right click and run as administrator.

In Registry Editor click on HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services and scroll all the way down to the folder called "msahci" and then right click on the icon called "start" in the right hand pane and choose modify.

Here we are going to set the Value data to "0" and click ok like the picture below:
Image

Next thing you need to do is reboot your computer and enter the bios and enable "AHCI"

Upon first boot in Windows 7 it will load AHCI drivers for each present drive and then you will need to reboot once more.

After that you will be getting the proper "Read and Write" speeds for you new shiny SSD.

Please see the below to screenshots and check out the 232 point difference in the benchmark.

Also please note that each time you see red as in the picture below that says "pciide - BAD" in anyones benchmark results it means that they have not properly setup their SSD. As you can see by the bottom benchmark it is now stating "msahci - OK" and it is green for good reason.

Before:
Image

After:
Image
 #18135  by chevy350
 19 Jul 2011, 02:39
Nice post, hopefully will be able to give it a try when they decide to lower the prices a tad more ;)
 #18136  by odinlives
 19 Jul 2011, 02:47
Even though that is the rated speed for SATA 3 each SSD has different sequential read and write speeds.

My crucial M4 has these advertised sequential read and write speeds:

Sustained Sequential Read = Up to 415 MB/s (SATA 6Gb/s)
Sustained Sequential Write = Up to 95 MB/s (SATA 6Gb/s)

I am getting 413 read and 104 write so I am actually over on the write and just a hair shy on the read now.

I had already installed Windows onto my SSD then changed AHCI in the bios and booted back into Windows without a problem so not sure why you couldn't? Even though I changed it didn't make a difference until I edited the registry and rebooted.
 #18138  by Giin70
 19 Jul 2011, 10:08
When you have windows installed and want to change setting to AHCI its kinda painful at times. Most hackintosher's have this set up by default so OSX loads properly. You can google for fix though, i believe the reg edit you described is part of it.
 #18143  by odinlives
 19 Jul 2011, 18:01
@xxrazor I see your benchmark but normally if AHCI is enabled it should read like this on AS SSD= 'msahci ok" and yours is not showing that...
hmmmm

Also are you using a SATA 3 port? Just thought I might ask to make sure because with a vertex 3 you should be getting speeds a lot higher than your benchmark.
 #20192  by chevy350
 12 Nov 2011, 12:54
AHCI also depends on if your running RAID0, will also show a different driver in use as well. Mine shows iastor for Intel
 #22737  by TheAslan
 10 Jul 2012, 03:43
Is it wise to use TuneUp Utilities while running a SSD drive? I know that you should not defrag your SSD but is it safe to use TU? And if it's safe to use TU is it safe to defrag your registry?