p6x58d Premium won't recognize Samsung EVO Drive on Sata III

[oldgoat99]

I decided to upgrade my system with more memory and an SSD.

 

I didn't have a sata 3 cable so I installed it using sata 2 and it worked fine. After I got a sata 3 cable I plugged it into a sata 3 port and shortly after power up I get "BOOTMGR Missing". I bought another cable and tried it with the same results.

 

So I installed windows 7 on one of my old drives and tried to see if the SSD would be seen by either of the internal sata 3 ports and... nada. If I lug it into a sata2 port and it sees it fine.

 

So, a couple questions.

1. Will sata 3 make it much faster?

2. I read somewhere that the sata 3 controller on the p6x58d is crap. Would a sata 3 adapter plugged into a PCI Express slot be the way to go? And if yes, does it matter which one?

 

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Edited March 19, 2014 by oldgoat99

[Bubbaxm2]

Bootmgr missing means it is probably looking at the wrong drive. After you plugged it into port 3 did you go back into the bios and select it as the boot drive?

[wevsspot]

Bubba likely hit the nail on the head.

 

To the subject of the X58 SATA controllers.

 

Use the Intel controller.  Even though it is SATA 3Gb/s overall it's still a better controller than the Marvell.  (don't forget to reset the BIOS boot option again though after changing  )

 

As for the cables, you can use one rated SATA 3Gb/s or SATA 6Gb/s.  You'll never know the difference.

[oldgoat99]

ok, yeah, I had the DVD out of the loop for booting which apparently was causing the BOOT MGR missing problem.

 

Now the ssd is not being recognized by the on-board sata 3 controller. In the bios I see the 6 sata 2 ports but nothing about any sata 3 ports?

 

So, do I download and install the latest bios or just plug the ssd into a sata 2 port and be done with it?

 

I appreciate your help.

[RHKCommander959]

The Marvell SATA 3 port settings are in a different place in BIOS than the Intel SATA 2 port settings. The Intel are better anyways, but the Marvell is probably disabled and thus why it isn't working. Enabling it will increase boot time too as it has to load the chipset after post, before OS boot.

 

Using a PCI-Express x4.0 or higher bandwidth card would allow for higher speeds, as long as it has a good controller. A x1 card would be a waste of money. Also depends on PCIe 1.0 or 2.0, PCIe 1.0 has 250 MB/s transfer rate per lane (lanes being the number such as x1, x4 - one lane, four lane). So you would want a minimum of 4 lanes (times 250 = 1 GB/s on PCIe 1.0) for an upgrade.

 

Realistically you won't really notice a difference, even if your read and writes are capped at ~300 MB/s instead of 500+ you will have almost no latency with either SATA 2 or 3 and THAT is what you notice. Much faster boot times are the first sign