Need a little help please

[Matt87109]

Thanks to anybody that can clear things up for me.

I did a fresh install on a Phoenix Pro FM-25S2S-120GBP2 last night using Win7Pro64.

-AHCI was NOT enabled in the bios for the install
-Windows did NOT recognize the drive as SSD and had it scheduled to defrag
-After installation and further reading I enabled AHCI in the bios and used the auto function of SSD Tweaker (program located on the OCZ forum that I found linked to in this form)

see performance pictures below. I'm aware that running crystal disk is bad so I just did sequential

My questions are:

1. this is low performance right?
2. how bad was it that AHCI was not enabled when I installed?
3. what should I do?
4. is there a post that has a simple set of instructions. I don't want to be a power user... just want to get it installed correctly. I don't know how to format this drive.... align .....so I'm a little lost and all the post leave me scratching my head because they look like a bunch of random tweaks that overlap.

Thank you very much.

[vaca]

Hi Matt87109,
if you want to do a fresh installation of windows7 Pro x64 on your new phoenix Pro SSD,just do the follows.
1. set your SATA mode to AHCI in BIOS.
2. start to install windows 7 and delete all things on your SSD then create a new partition. windows 7 will automatically align your partition.
3. finish the OS installation and install motherboard driver.
4. Enjoy the high speed experience.

[Matt87109]

Hi Matt87109,
if you want to do a fresh installation of windows7 Pro x64 on your new phoenix Pro SSD,just do the follows.
1. set your SATA mode to AHCI in BIOS.
2. start to install windows 7 and delete all things on your SSD then create a new partition. windows 7 will automatically align your partition.
3. finish the OS installation and install motherboard driver.
4. Enjoy the high speed experience.

Thank you for replying. I had just finished accomplishing your instructions. As you can see my drives performance is improved. Can anybody explain why my video card has dropped over a whole point on the windows experience index? I ran the analysis both before and after the post install SSD tweaks and got the following result both times. Edit: I just noted that WEI is not acknologing my firepro v5800 video card like it was in the first post????....the device manager does indicate v5800.

[vaca]

i'm not sure about your video card.
But you could try to reinstall or update your video card driver, maybe it works.

[Matt87109]

AHCI Causes Problems With Video Performance - ATI Firepro V5800

I have reinstalled several times now and confirmed that my ATI Firepro v5800 video card's performance is linked to the bios setting IDE vs. AHCI at the time of the install (win7Pro64). I have decided to not enable AHCI during the install because my video drops from 7.2 to 6.0. As a result of not having AHCI enabled my hard drive performance drops from 7.7 to 7.2 in rating.

I have confirmed that the performance is degraded before any SSD tweaking occurs by installing windows, the video driver, and running Windows Experience Index in both scenarios with no other differences.

This is not to say that an advanced user could not get both AHCI and the maximum video window score at the same time.

I have done what is recommended on this forum except I did not enable AHCI. My $440 dollar v5800's performance is more important than top SSD performance. The only thing I don't know is if not having AHCI enabled with reduce my SSD's reliability or increase degradation in performance. Hopefully it is just an upfront reduction in performance that has no other consequences.

All things considered I'm very happy with my Phoenix Pro.

Thanks for your help.

Matt