Lack of AHCI on MOBO

[robstreats]

I have an Asus Motherboard (M4N68T-M-LE-V2 (AM3) with 4 x SATA 2 ports. The Mobo does not offer AHCI mode in the BIOS. I am thinking of adding an SSD with SATA 3 capabilities to my system. My question is would a SATA 3 PCI extension card solve the AHCI problem or if not is there any other way of providing AHCI other than changing my MOBO? I thank you for any help you can give.

[tomasz86]

If the extension card uses its own BIOS then yes, you should be able to have AHCI. The problem is that a PCI card itself will be slow and you won't be able to use SATA3 transfers anyway. If you actually meant PCI-E then the situation is different but here also you'll probably need a decent controller to be able to fully utilise the SSD.

[MagicAndre1981]

I think it is better to buy a motherboard with 850 southbridge which supports 6Gb SATA.

[puntoMX]

I think it is better to buy a motherboard with 850 southbridge which supports 6Gb SATA.

Indeed, +1 on that one.

[tomasz86]

It's only now that I've looked at the motherboards' model more carefully... and realised that I had an experience to use this particular board in the past.

It DOES support AHCI!

As far as I know there were some legal issues with nVIDIA using the "AHCI" name in its BIOS (correct me if I'm wrong) so you can't enable it in a "normal" way. What you should do is to enable RAID. Enabling RAID equals enabling AHCI. And yes, you can use even one disk in the RAID mode on this board.

[robstreats]

Thank you tomasz86 , I do appreciate your interest and help. I tried turning on RAID for just the SSD (I have never used RAID and am not familiar with it), BIOS allowed me to turn it on but then doesn't like it as a singleton and asks for further settings that I cannot provide. When I then try to boot, it comes up with 'missing operating system'. As a separate issue, I am now experimenting with Win 8!!

[MarkJohnson]

I have an Asus Motherboard (M4N68T-M-LE-V2 (AM3) with 4 x SATA 2 ports. The Mobo does not offer AHCI mode in the BIOS. I am thinking of adding an SSD with SATA 3 capabilities to my system. My question is would a SATA 3 PCI extension card solve the AHCI problem or if not is there any other way of providing AHCI other than changing my MOBO? I thank you for any help you can give.

Have you tried running it in plain IDE mode? I have an SSD sata 3 in my nephews system and it runs just fine after a year. no issues other than running at sata II speeds. The difference between sata II and sata III is negligible compared to HDD to SSD.

Most all SSDs have a garbage collection mode to self TRIM themselves.

Luck

-=Mark=-

[tomasz86]

Thank you tomasz86 , I do appreciate your interest and help. I tried turning on RAID for just the SSD (I have never used RAID and am not familiar with it), BIOS allowed me to turn it on but then doesn't like it as a singleton and asks for further settings that I cannot provide. When I then try to boot, it comes up with 'missing operating system'. As a separate issue, I am now experimenting with Win 8!!

There is a RAID option on that mainboard which allows to use just a single disk. I don't remember its name unfortunately but you should experiment with all of the available ones (there aren't many of them anyway). Just make sure that all the data is backed up because the disk will have to be repartitioned and reformatted after changing those RAID settings.