Is the MSATA slot in the Alienware M14x R2 rated at SATA 2 II or SATA 3 III speed?

Is the MSATA slot in the Alienware M14x R2 rated at SATA 2 II or SATA 3 III speed?

I ran a AS SSD benchmark and it seems to be showing results consistent with SATA3.



SATA3 speeds are supposed to be around 600MB/s and SATA2 is supposed to be capped at 300MB/s.

Does anyone know for sure if Dell was wise enough to put one of the SATA3 controllers on the MSATA slot?

 

As far as I know, SATA 2

 

If you do a bench with ATTO Disk Benchmark, what values ​​do you have?

Ciao

 

Looks pretty similar?

 

the mSATA is SATAIII 6G. what type of mSATA SSD are you using? also did you check if the Write-Back cache is enabled in the intel storage utility? I Have a Mushkin Atlas and it does hit full rated speeds for me. seeing that your read speeds are breaking 500, but your writes are jacked, I'd check the write-back cache first. If you are not using the intel storage drivers I would definitely install them. I had garbage performance in windows 8 with the MS storage driver. once I installed irst 11.7 and enabled wbc my speeds improved dramatically.

 

Well, if you're getting speeds above SATA II, then YES, it probably supports SATA III ;]

The Primary HDD is also SATA III, while the ODD port is SATA II.

This is only for the r2, mind you. The r1 is crippled.

 

Thanks that's a great help!

How were you able to enable the write back cache? Intel's HELP seems inaccurate?



At least now, I can confirm that it is a SATA 3 connection! But, what is Intel Rapid Storage Technology talking about? There is no option to change the Write Back Cache?

I tried this on my system and it shows the Write-Back Cache status but, again, there's no way to change its setting?

 

Go to the device manager and find the drive and go to its properties. then hit the policies tab. there are 2 boxes and most likely the bottom one is unchecked. you want both boxes checked. once that is done go back into irst and you will now have the option to enable wbc where it previously said disabled. hope that helps!

 

Sweet!! That worked!! Thanks!

 

The M14x r2 runs the mSATA at SATA III speeds.

 

For whatever unknown reason, the MSATA slot has forced itself into SATA2 mode?

and there is no longer any write back cache option



I'm not sure what happened?

I tried restoring a system image I had made before this happened but the MSATA is still stuck at SATA3 even after a system restore?

Any ideas?

 

Did you do a BIOS or firmware update? Or even an update or downgrade to Intel RST could have caused a conflict with the SATA controller to force it back to SATA II.

 

I wish I did! Then, I would have an idea of why a SATA3 port suddenly decided to become a SATA2 port.

This is really baffling!

This is my GF's machine and I don't know what she did/didn't do to it. However, I did restore it using a system image of when it was working properly as a SATA3 port.

And it's still behaving like a SATA2?? That's the really baffling part!

I never thought a SATA3 connection could just downgrade itself?

UPDATE:

I unchecked that "Turn off windows..." box and now it's 6gbps again....whew!



However, I've lost the Enable Write Back Cache option, even after I checked that "Turn off windows..." box?

Strange! Maybe Micron SSD's don't have WBC feature?

Maybe RAID mode is required for WBC?

Maybe AHCI mode doesn't support?

Is "Disk Data Cache" the same thing as WBC?

 

Great to hear you got it back to SATA III again. :thumbsup:

IIRC, disk data cache refers to the system using system RAM as a buffer for writing data to the storage drives. Write-back cache refers to the process in which data is cached before it is written onto the RAM. This is opposed to write-through cache. Here, educate yourself: http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/W/write_back_cache.html.

As far as the better performance/quick removal setting in the drive's device manager, I haven't found a reason why it shows up sometimes and doesn't in others. But I think it has something to do with the firmware of the HDDs/SSDs. Possibly it gets locked out by the OEM, but this is just me theory of course.