AMD SB600 AHCI modern driver exploration
I have an HP DV2 subnote. Athlon Neo 1.6, M690E, SB600, Radeon 3450, 4GB RAM. XP is notably smoother than 7x64 so it's running XP.
I've discovered that I can force SB600 out of Native IDE mode by manually installing (or slipstreaming) the AMD RAID/AHCI driver. So I tried a few driver versions. The SB600 driver is based on v3.100.x, as is that for SB7xx. SB8xx has v3.3.x. I force installed 3.3.x on SB600 and it worked. In fact, it has working NCQ unlike v3.100.x.
Here is how a Seagate Momentus XT 500GB scores.
NCQ working (QD32 result).
NCQ essentially non functional.
I know that SB600 and SB700 are known for some rather weak AHCI performance but this at least looks better than it was years ago. I've no idea why AMD hasn't updated the official SB600 RAID/AHCI driver in years though, or why the pure AHCI driver only supports SB700 and newer. Actually if you install the current AHCI driver on SB700 get ready for a BSOD on boot. That can be fixed with a change to one of their registry settings though.
Booting Linux on it inspired me because I noticed in the kernel log that NCQ was in use. The Linux SATA driver also ignores the BIOS configuration of the controller.
I have an HP DV2 subnote. Athlon Neo 1.6, M690E, SB600, Radeon 3450, 4GB RAM. XP is notably smoother than 7x64 so it's running XP.
I've discovered that I can force SB600 out of Native IDE mode by manually installing (or slipstreaming) the AMD RAID/AHCI driver. So I tried a few driver versions. The SB600 driver is based on v3.100.x, as is that for SB7xx. SB8xx has v3.3.x. I force installed 3.3.x on SB600 and it worked. In fact, it has working NCQ unlike v3.100.x.
Here is how a Seagate Momentus XT 500GB scores.
NCQ working (QD32 result).
NCQ essentially non functional.
I know that SB600 and SB700 are known for some rather weak AHCI performance but this at least looks better than it was years ago. I've no idea why AMD hasn't updated the official SB600 RAID/AHCI driver in years though, or why the pure AHCI driver only supports SB700 and newer. Actually if you install the current AHCI driver on SB700 get ready for a BSOD on boot. That can be fixed with a change to one of their registry settings though.
Booting Linux on it inspired me because I noticed in the kernel log that NCQ was in use. The Linux SATA driver also ignores the BIOS configuration of the controller.