heads up faster hard drive speeds

datonyb wrote: just picked up a point on the overclockers uk thread it seems the amd chipset driver for hard drives is NOT autoinstalling when you run the driver packadge open device manager click sata/ahci and it is listed as three standard drivers click update driver and direct it with browse computer to the amd folder click ok and it installs the amd driver (this only will work on one of your three sata/achi devices so try it on all three to find which one does want/need the update) it now will display amd sata controller + two standard sata controllers reboot and your off i gained some needed 20% gains on my 4k read and write speeds on my samsung nvme drive

Yes, for some reason the AMD chipset driver package, when run on a Ryzen system, will not automatically install the AMD AHCI driver for any of the multiple AMD SATA controllers on Ryzen. The standard MSoft storahci AHCI driver remains installed after the AMD chipset driver package installer is run. I don't know if this is a bug in the AMD chipset driver package, or Windows not cooperating. Or possibly that AMD did not intend for their AHCI driver to be used with Ryzen. What is the name of the AMD driver that was installed?

One quick note, datonyb has the X370 Taichi board, which provides eight AMD SATA ports, and the Fatal1ty X370 Professional Gaming board does too, via three separate AMD SATA controllers. All of the other ASRock AM4 boards provide six or four AMD SATA ports, from either two or one AMD SATA controller(s). These boards will only have one or two entries in the Device Manager, ATA/ATAPI Controllers entry, which is normal given the number of SATA ports they provide.

Now on to the curious and interesting part of his post, which is not about why the AMD AHCI driver is not automatically installed. He said after installing the AMD AHCI SATA driver, his Samsung NMVe SSD showed a 20% performance increase in its 4K file read and write speeds. I have seen a similar claim from Intel mother board users after they installed the Intel AHCI/RAID driver, that their NVMe SSD had improved performance in benchmark tests. I've wondered about this for a while now, and finally have a chance to comment on it.

Why is this interesting? SATA and NVMe are two different storage protocols. They each use different drivers, Samsung, Intel, and Microsoft each provide NVMe drivers, without an NVMe driver an NVMe SSD cannot work. NVMe SSDs do not use the SATA AHCI driver. You can use an NVMe SSD in a PC with no SATA drives installed, and no SATA AHCI driver installed.

NVMe SSDs actually have an NVMe controller chip included in every NVMe SSD. They do not use a SATA controller. For each NVMe SSD you have in a PC, there will be a separate entry in Device Manager under Storage Controllers. Each of the NVMe controller entries will include the NVMe driver being used.

SATA drives do not have a SATA controller chip. They use the SATA controller chip(s) built into a mother board. That is the way SATA has always worked. Since mother boards do not (yet) have an NVMe controller built into them, NVMe SSDs must have their own NVMe controller chip in order to work.

Adding further to the separation of SATA and NVMe, the Ultra M.2 slot of the X370 Taichi, and all of the other Ultra M.2 slots in ASRock AM4 boards, use the PCIe 3.0 lanes provided by the CPU. Ryzen processors, being SOC type chips, have one or two SATA controllers included in them, depending upon the model. They are separate and use different PCIe lanes.

The big question is, given all of this, how can an AHCI driver influence the performance of an NVMe SSD? I have not said that it does or doesn't, but I am struggling to understand how it possibly can. Does a different AHCI driver somehow affect the general or overall latency of the PCIe or other related buss? Does a different SATA AHCI driver somehow affect the benchmark test results run on an NVMe SSD? Is the improved 4K performance of an NVMe SSD in a benchmark test actually related to something else? I don't have an answer but IMO this situation, if true, is very unusual.

If someone said their SATA drive had better performance when using a different AHCI driver, I would not wonder about it at all. But an NVMe SSD's performance improving after installing a different SATA AHCI driver? How does that happen?

And here all this time I thought with heads up they are considered to be Parked

nangu, thanks for doing that testing.

I agree it is difficult to know which SATA ports are connected to which SATA controller, and do we know which SATA controller is now using the AMD AHCI driver. I have not searched through the Device Manager details for each of the SATA controllers, and other programs, to see if I can identify which SATA controller is connected to specific SATA ports. I am guessing that SATA ports 1 - 4 are connected to the CPU's SATA controller, and 5 - 6 are connected to the chipset SATA controller. My X370 Killer SLI/ac board has six AMD SATA III ports.

My first test results were the same as yours for a SATA SSD, the 4K speeds were not improved, and have always been less than they were on Intel boards.

My 960 EVO actually had worse 4K results than I have had in the past after the AMD AHCI driver installation. But using two 500GB 960 EVOs in various PCs, IMO they are inconsistent in their benchmark results. Some tests are good, others are not as good, judged outside of the normal range of benchmark results variations, using the same driver.

I'm not saying this AMD SATA AHCI driver theory is false, but I'm not seeing anything yet that makes me think it does make a difference.

I noticed the date of the AMD SATA AHCI driver is 3/29/2015, version 1.2.1.402. Certainly that is pre-Ryzen. So if the Ryzen SATA controller is new, that driver isn't. I believe before Ryzen was released, I read that the SATA chipset that would be used was provided by... ASMedia.   If it is, it clearly is not using a single PCIe 2.0 lane as all ASMedia add on SATA chipsets have used in the past. The sequential read and write speeds are clearly at the SATA III level, which cannot be said for the ASMedia add on chipsets on earlier mother boards.