How to use SuperSpeed on Asus P5Q Pro Turbo

[Bill Anderson]

I have identical 1TB HDDs that I'd like to use with the board's Drive
Xpert mode to have a high speed RAID0-like 2TB drive. I've installed
the drives in the orange and white sockets and I've chosen SuperSpeed in
BIOS and I've allowed BIOS to do whatever it did to the drives and now
I'm showing a new 1TB drive in Windows 7 64-bit. BIOS tells me that
it's a 2TB drive, but Windows is having none of it.

I tried installing from the P5Q's installation disk the Intel Matrix
Storage Manager but that only bogged down the system. It took over a
half hour to boot fully (some things came up immediately and worked,
like Windows Explorer, but the network took FOREVER to launch).

Somewhere I googled that I need to have installed some sort of Marvell
driver to make SuperSpeed work, but I don't know what that is.

Anybody have any experience with making the P5Q Pro Turbo give Windows 7
whatever it needs to see the two 1TB drives as one 2TB drive? Thanks.

Bill Anderson

[Paul]

P5Q Pro Turbo

ICH10R
5 x SATA II

JMB361
1 x ribbon cable
1 x ESATA

SIL5723
Two port combiner SATA II, with internal processor (potential rate limit)

*******

ICH10R ---- \
---- \
---- \___ Five ordinary SATA ports
---- /
---- /
----- sil5723 ---- SATA_E1 Orange (1TB)
---- SATA_E2 White (1TB)

The driver would be whatever driver is on ICH10R. The ICH10R
is in control here. The SIL5723 combines the two drives, and
creates a single virtual drive with bogus naming convention.
The drives should no longer have a "personality" when they're
behind the SIL5723.

You should not need any "special" driver for ICH10R, as near as
I can tell. The SIL5723 is supposed to emulate a single drive,
no matter what is behind it. So to the ICH10R, it looks like
a sixth hard drive of 2TB capacity (when your config is in
SuperSpeed mode).

I would return to the BIOS menu, try all operating modes
(Superspeed, EZBackup, Normal mode), then return to the
OS and see what capacity and status is reported. It's possible
you have a bad SATA cable, so try changing cables, try
swapping drives on the two connectors and so on. Or,
verify the drives work (report 1TB each), when connected
to the five ordinary SATA ports. There has to be an answer
there somewhere. Make sure the drives have power etc.

Maybe the SIL5723 chip itself has a bad port, or the orange or white
connector is dirty or bad. It may not be possible to test
the two ports equally well, as in single drive mode, E1 is
preferred. I don't know if a single drive on E2 would work
in single drive mode. You could try it.

The I2C interface might possibly be able to report RAID
status, but motherboards don't typically connect that
to anything. On something like a NAS, the I2C would be
connected to something, for monitoring.

http://www.siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?pid=103

The first version of this chip, was a flop. I think the product
brief of the first generation part, actually stated it was
limited to around 110MB/sec or so. Presumably, this one
was fixed, but also note that the Product Brief for your
chip, no longer attempts to estimate performance. So when
you do get it working, benchmark in HDTune (free version 2.55)
to see how well the internal processor on that thing works.
To test chips like this unambiguously, a couple SSD drives
would be a good choice. But you can use the "burst transfer
rate" number from HDTune as an estimate. The cache on your
hard drives, is bigger than the FIFO on the 5723.

http://www.siliconimage.com/docs/sii5723_pb_FINAL_11-28-06.pdf

Paul

[Bill Anderson]

Yay! Got it! Done. Fixed. Working!

The first clue came from you, Paul, and the second was dumb luck. You
made it clear that I needed ICH10R to be working under Windows and I
just figured that naturally it was. Then came the dumb luck: I forgot
and left my P5Q Turbo installation CD in the drive when I rebooted and
when the computer booted from it right there in front of me it was
asking if I wanted to create a 32-bit or 64-bit ICH10R driver
installation disk. Well...

So I tried to create a 64-bit disk and it asked me to insert a formatted
floppy into my A: drive. Well...

I haven't had an A: drive in years, so I decided to do a little
exploring on the P5Q's installation disk. And so it was that I found
under /drivers/RAID/imsm/Install/Ahci the file
ICH10_AHCI_FOR_DriveXpert.msi.
Well...

That folder also had a setup.exe in it so I ran that as administrator
and voila! It installed a driver.

Now when I rebooted into Windows things got interesting. First I got a
white text/black background screen telling me Windows was going to run
whatever they call ScanDisk these days, and so it did. Then it rebooted
and next I got a white text/black background screen telling me I needed
to run fdisk on the drive. Then I rebooted and got into Windows, which
seemed obsessed with telling me my recycle bin was corrupted. The first
thing I did was go to Computer Management and check Disk Management,
where I discovered a new disk with two 1Tb partitions. Hah!

So I deleted the two partitions back to a total of almost 2Tbs of
unallocated space, and then partitioned and formatted my new 2Tb drive
as I wanted.

And now it's working. I'm not sure about it being SuperSpeedy, but I
will run the test you recommended later this evening to see. Right now
I'm just copying data into my new partitions.

All this is in preparation for a new SSD Newegg has on the way. Hope to
get it Friday. All the reviews say it'll seem like I've bought a new
computer. We shall see. It's a Samsung 256 GB SATA III that'll really
shine one of these days when I have an SATA III MBo. But for now I'm
keeping my fingers crossed that the SSD will keep me happy on my SATA II
P5Q for awhile.

You may remember we communicated a couple of weeks ago about my
inability to make Win7 switch from RAID mode to IDE to accommodate a new
3TB drive. Well, all that has inspired me to re-install everything on a
separate drive -- Win7 64-bit and all apps -- just to make sure I can do
it when the SSD arrives. I'll want to have a fresh AHCI installation on
it.

I'd dreaded doing this because I knew what a hassle it would be to (once
again) make Google Calendar Sync play nice with Outlook. I'd been
through all that once before and it was a huge headache. I mean,
everything else I could do, but making Outlook work was driving me
crazy. But now, after about a week and a half of experimenting, I've
achieved Nirvana: I can install Win7 64-bit and all my apps and
everything works.

There were two problems with Outlook: 1) When I installed Google
Calendar Sync (an absolute must for me), Outlook would begin asking me
to identify a profile, even if there was only one profile to choose
from. And 2) Outlook would stop closing properly on exit. I'd end up
with three instances of Outlook running and then it wouldn't load again.
I'd have to run Task Manager and kill three Outlook processes in order
to start it up again.

Turned out there was a two-part solution. 1) After installing Outlook
and then Google Calendar Sync, I needed to install the Outlook Business
Manager -- free software offered by Microsoft to owners of Outlook.
That fixed the "profile" problem And 2) Avast AntiVirus was the culprit
regarding Outlook shutting down. I'd thought it was iTunes, but it
wasn't. Even with the Avast add-in disabled in Outlook, it still caused
a problem But Microsoft Security Essentials causes no problem at all,
so that's the virus protection I'll use from now on. I will never know
how it is that I have Avast playing nice with Outlook on my old 32-bit
and 64-bit dual boot system, but I do. I don't know what I did. But I
don't have to worry about that anymore, apparently.

And that's my story up to now. As always, Paul, many thanks for your
incredible help!

--
Bill Anderson

I am the Mighty Favog

[Bill Anderson]

On 5/31/2012 2:42 PM, Paul wrote:

>

> The first version of this chip, was a flop. I think the product
> brief of the first generation part, actually stated it was
> limited to around 110MB/sec or so. Presumably, this one
> was fixed, but also note that the Product Brief for your
> chip, no longer attempts to estimate performance. So when
> you do get it working, benchmark in HDTune (free version 2.55)
> to see how well the internal processor on that thing works.
> To test chips like this unambiguously, a couple SSD drives
> would be a good choice. But you can use the "burst transfer
> rate" number from HDTune as an estimate. The cache on your
> hard drives, is bigger than the FIFO on the 5723.

OK I ran HDTune 2.55 (free) and here's what it said about my new 2TB
SuperSpeed drive:

Transfer Rate
Minimum: 87.9 MB/sec
Maximum 113.1 MB/sec

Is that good? Bad? Sorta OK? I've done some Googling and I can't find
a straight answer, but "sorta OK" seems the best description. Agree?
Thanks.

[Paul]

You can try moving each disk individually, to one of the regular Intel
ports, and measuring there.

In theory, a good RAID setup with two identical disks, should be
able to make double the speed when doing RAID 0. Based on the size of
your drives, they're probably not that old, in which case, they should
probably be giving a curve with a higher initial value (at the outside edge
of the platter).

The HDTune window, should have a "burst transfer" measurement on the right
hand side. And while that measurement method isn't perfect, it too might
hint at the 5723 being a bottleneck.

The thing is, I have a 500GB drive that can manage 125MB/sec on the
left hand of the curve. And that's a single drive, by itself. There
is nothing special about that drive - it was the cheapest thing I could
find at the time. And there are some really amazing drives out there - I
think there is a drive now, at 180MB/sec (hard drive, not an SSD).
The older generation still in my rotation, are around 65-70MB/sec.
The crappiest drive I have which still runs (a WD), is a 4GB drive at 8MB/sec.
Not even as fast as my USB flash sticks.

Move the drive connector over to an Intel port, and re-run HDTune.

Paul

[Paul]

I found a result here. The person benchmarking, doesn't report the
drives being used.

http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?190550-Silicon-Image-SIL57XX-Controller-VS-Intel-ICH10R-(Asus-P5Q-Series-Maximus-II-Formula)

There are three charts.

1) ICH10R (Intel RAID)
Best case sustained - about 133MB/sec
Burst transfer speed - 255.6MB/sec

Now, that doesn't make sense, because a single SATA II might have been able
to burst like that. I'd have expected a higher burst number. Burst testing
has been known to be unreliable (needs tweaking every time another SSD comes out).

2) ICH10R (Intel RAID with writeback cache)

All this does, is "blow out" the burst transfer speed, to motherboard RAM speed.
So rather useless, in terms of interpreting hardware performance.

3) Silicon image 57xx (their terminology)

Best case sustained - around 113MB/sec and eerily similar to the previous
generation Silicon Image design.

Flat spot on sustained curve, shows "bottleneck limiting" or SIL5723 "processor".

Read and write performance are radically different.

Testing with SSDs would be more fun, as then there is no ambiguity about
the bottleneck. But I wasn't able to find any examples of that.

HTH,
Paul

[Bill Anderson]

On 5/31/2012 8:35 PM, Bill Anderson wrote:

>
> All this is in preparation for a new SSD Newegg has on the way. Hope to
> get it Friday. All the reviews say it'll seem like I've bought a new
> computer. We shall see. It's a Samsung 256 GB SATA III that'll really
> shine one of these days when I have an SATA III MBo. But for now I'm
> keeping my fingers crossed that the SSD will keep me happy on my SATA II
> P5Q for awhile.
>

For anyone around here who has been wondering whether investing in a new
SSD would be a good idea -- whether installing OS and all apps on an SSD
would provide a noticeable improvement in performance -- I'll just say
I'm majorly pleased.

Installing the SSD was a breeze; it has behaved for me just like a
regular HDD and Windows 7 installed on it without a single hiccup. For
data storage and video editing I still have another four HDDs in the
system, one 3TB, one 1.5TB, and two 1TB drives paired as "SuperSpeed"
drives under the P5Q's Drive Xpert feature.

The SSD doesn't work magic, but it sure does speed things up on an Asus
P5Q. From a cold start my Windows 7 is now up and running in about 30
seconds, and this is with all Win7 updates installed plus about three
dozen apps and gadgets. Virus protection is Windows Security Essentials.

But even better than boot time is the almost incredible speed with which
my apps load. Click on the Word icon and boom, I'm looking at a blank
page. Same for everything else -- what once took maybe 10 or more
seconds to load now takes less than 5 -- like Photoshop CS5 64-bit for
instance, which I just now checked and it loaded in two seconds flat.

Of course I know from experience that any time you install a clean OS
with clean apps you'll get improved performance -- for awhile, anyway.
But I've never seen an improvement like this. Pretty amazing, actually.

And that's my experience so far.