New rig, hard disk not performing well

[Onzle]

Hi people,
Well, I have just put together a new rig for myself.
Asus Maximus IV
i5 2500k
4 gig corsair vengeance ram
using my old corsair 620 w psu and
9800 gpu untill I can afford a better GPU
and a WD Caviar black 1tb sata3 6 gb/s hard disk.

Everything went together no problems. Partitioned the hard drive into 200 mb - 800 mb partitions and installed windows onto the 200 mb partition. Everything seems fine.
Problem is, during start up after the maximus splash screen a little blurb flashes that states "hard disk not detected". Start up continues on and windows loads and everything runs fine. This would not be a problem for me but when I check out my windows experience index, I get a score of 5.9 because the primary hard disk data transfer rate only rates 5.9. Shouldn't this be higher with a 6 gb/s hard disk?

I have the sata cable plugged into the red connector closest to the grey connectors which I believe is the intel serial sata connector.

Am I doing something wrong?

Thank you,
Onzle

[xeromist]

The Windows experience index is a terrible measure of performance. You should run something like HD Tune and compare that to others with the same or similar drives.
http://www.hdtune.com/download.html

[Brian@ASUS]

well i wouldnt say windows experience is terrible, it does test stability especially when you overclock, the first thing you should do is run windows experience index. if it cant pass that, most likely youll blue screen in a more stressful benchmark.

i would use hdtune or atto to measure your read write performance. although you may have a sata6 capable hdd, it is no where near a fast as a SSD. its probably pushing out 100mb/s read speeds where as ssd push out 300-500mb/s win 7 will take the overall performance index and measure your score. basically microsoft is telling you, buy an ssd.

[Onzle]

I downloaded the trial version of HD Tune. It looks to be a very usefull program for benchmarking hard drives. Being the trial version I can only do a read test, and I would upload a screen shot if I could figure out how. The gist of it is however, It will read an average of 104 MB\s, with access time at 13 ms and burst rate up to 284 MB\s. These seem to be very good numbers as on HD Tune's website there were no drives with a read speed over 100 MB\s. I would assume all of their test were done on sata and sata 2 drives but still, good numbers overall. An ssd drive for the OS coupled with a drive like this for storage would be the icing on any system.

Still, the message during startup that sez "hard disk not detected" seems out of place to me. Especially since everything seems to run just fine.

[xeromist]

Your board has two different disk controllers so I'm guessing that the message you get is for the controller not being used. You could experiment with disabling the other controller in the BIOS (whichever is not being used) and the message should go away as well as possibly booting faster. You just have to remember you enable it again if you ever need it.

[Praz]

I have the sata cable plugged into the red connector closest to the grey connectors which I believe is the intel serial sata connector.
That would be one of the Intel SATA 6 GB/s ports. Go into the UEFI -> Advanced -> Onboard Devices Configuration and disable both the Marvell Storage Controller and the JMB Storage Controller. The message during Post should go away.

[Brian@ASUS]

ah yea as praz mentioned during post its probably your marvel controller that is enabled trying to detect a hdd that is not there. like he said disable it and itll go away.

[Onzle]

sweet success! Thanks guys.
I have been looking at the SATA configuration menu but that only was allowing me to disable the various ports which were allready disabled. The Onboard Devices config menu is where its at.
Also, Now my computer does indeed boot faster. After the initial splash screen and single beep it loads windows directly.
Now I feel a bit more comfotable about going ahead and slowly learning about O.C'ing.

Again, cheers for the help.
Awesome forum\community!
'Onzle

[Praz]

You're welcome. :)

[Kipper]

Problem is solved I know but I thought I would add that using the Marvel controller for you SATA optical drives works a treat and frees up other ports for your SSD or spinner drives.

Then during boot you will not see the "No Drives Found" message but your Optical Drives will be listed.

Just a thought.