We just bought new machines a couple of weeks back.  They’re pretty sweet.  I don’t normally splurge on things, but I do like to buy quality that serves a purpose.  So, rather than buying a typical off-the-shelf Dell or even an HP workstation, I decided to have some built by my good friend Jeremy Siprelle who knows how to build such things.  I’m a demanding customer, though, and wanted some top shelf parts and some solid but economical parts.

The case is a Silverstone Raven.  Beautiful, oddball, and huge.  Beautiful because Jeremy built everything so the power cables are all shrinked in black against a fully powder coated black case, so there’s no light leakage or reflections inside the case, except from the motherboard and piping.  We didn’t get a circus case with glowing LEDs… that’s for kids.  But looking inside a perfectly clean case is a joy in itself.  Oddball, in that the motherboard is rotated 90 degrees so that the connectors are UP rather than BACK.  This helps heat rise off cards, as well as the massive but slow moving fans in the base of the case blow just enough air upward that the heat is extracted, but make almost no noise.  Huge, in that it’s at least 8 inches longer than a normal case, so there’s plenty of room to mount a ridiculous number of hard drives in it.  My one gripe about the case is that since there’s a lid that is relatively close to the connectors, if you buy any dongles or rigid converters, you may have trouble fitting the lid back on.  Display port – to – HDMI connectors sometimes are this way, and we had to buy cable-style ones rather than rigid.  No biggie, but a minor annoyance.

The mobo is a Gigabyte X58 of some variant, with a Core i7 920 and 6gb of tri-channel ram.  Plenty of bandwidth, lots of speed, and 8 cores (4 + 4 hyper).  Yeah, it’s fast.

Most important, though, was my insistence on a Sandforce driven solid-state drive (SSD).  The first one I could get a hold of was the Corsair, which at 100gb is not tiny but not huge either.  It’s incredibly snappy compared to the 7200rpm drives I’m used to.  Oh, and silent and produces virtually no heat.  Today, though, I was dinking around and decided to run a few benchmarks.

HOLY CRAP.  The drive wasn’t all that fast.  Access times are incredible, but the throughput was lousy at the low-end, and only climbed up near the 285mb/s it’s supposed to have when you get up to very large file sizes, and  even then it was only at 235mb/s.  I gave it a pass since the drive is already 60% full, and SSD’s are supposed to degrade a little as they fill.  Except Sandforce controllers aren’t supposed to.

After an hour of reading and tinkering and running benchmarks, I found out that the BIOS needs the SATA controller to be configured for AHCI rather than IDE mode, and the registry (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/System/CurrentControlSet/Services/Msahci) needs to have a tweak ‘Start’ changed to zero (0) rather than 3.  Change the registry first, then the bios, then reboot twice and Windows 7 will figure it out.  Don’t sweat the first reboot… it takes a long time!

Once I’d gotten that fixed up and re-run the benchmarks, I’m getting over 120mb/s at 4kb random reads and writes, and easily hitting 285mb/s on anything over 64kb.  Smokin’! So, if you have an SSD, you might consider checking your settings.  Yes, they matter.  A lot.

JH

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