Original Striker Extreme and SSD Compatibility

[desolator4u]

Sup ppl?
I have the original Striker Extreme nForce 680i MoBo and it's still running amazing. Overclocked CPU, powerful GPU, now all that's missing is fast storage to keep up. I want to get an SSD for my system, such as the 64GB Crucial M4 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820148441 and I am having a hard time finding the info I need that will allow me to purchase one in confidence.
From my findings, the board does not support AHCI, a hardware limitation, so I will not be able to update the firmware on the SSD if I need to do so, is that correct? And does anyone still have the board and any experience with an SSD installed? Need an idea of it's compatibility, performance and any possible issues I could run into.

Thanks
~Des

[HiVizMan]

Sorry mate not able to help you there.

You might want to ask on the Nvidea forum, the chipset being nVid after all.

[Baalberith]

Hi, i had a SE as my previous build, this in combo with 2 x M4 128gb Crucials
compabillity is no problem what so ever, but the read speeds are "limited" to around 250MB/s, this due to sata2

[HiVizMan]

I would suspect that is indeed the case.

[desolator4u]

Thanks. How long did you run those 2 SSD's in the Strike Extreme?
What I am worried about is all these features I don't think my board supports. AHCI, along with TRIM, which is what i've read is suppose to ensure the drive continues to perform fast after a lot of read & write over a long period of time. TRIM is hardware specific, right? And again, firmware updates can't be done without AHCI.

[xeromist]

Yes, Trim must be supported by hardware and by operating system. I'm not sure that the controller really matters though as long as the drive & OS support it. AHCI is controller so you definitely wouldn't have that.

[desolator4u]

Yeah, it's been a while now, but I finally went ahead and got the Crucial M4 128GB SSD. After about 2 weeks, I can say it works perfectly, as Baalberith already said.

Crystal Disk Mark and AS SSD both give me about 280 MB/s Read, as well as the max the drive supports for the Write at 170. I used Paragon Migrate OS to SSD software and after about 20 mins, my 90GB OS Partition from my WD Back HDD (that was about 105 Read) was moved to the SSD and made bootable (then I had to altering the HDD priority).

Boot times went from 22 seconds after POST to 15 seconds. Not a huge difference, but it use to take another 20 secs or so after moving from the Welcome Screen to the Desktop, now it's like 5! Every program on startup just appears all at once. Overclocking is also less of a pain with the quicker boot after the system locks up or crases. Running BF3 and Natural Selection 2 load very very fast. No more texture pop-ins with BF3 or joining a server late. It's amazing, especially when knowning the SSD can run at 500 MB/s.

CrystalDisk shows TRIM and NCQ are both enabled as well.

Certainly worth the time and money to get a SSD, even for a SATA II system. Can't wait to use it on a new board when I upgrade, or even RAID them.