Studio XPS 1340 Driver Advice

Hi,

Hoping for some advice here, I have studio XPS 1340, with a Crucial C300 SSD installed. I'm not sure which of the Motherboard drivers I should be using.

When installing the chipset drivers I'm asked to install the following.

Nvidia SMU Driver

Nvidia Storage Driver

Nvidia Audio Driver - I know to isntall this!

Regarding the SMU driver and storage driver should I install these? There is a meesage about running raid when I choose the storage driver which of course I don't use, so any advice would be appreciated.

Also my drive is showing as attached is this right? Am I getting the full benefits of my ssd?

 

Sorry forgot to attach screenshot of device manager.

 

What kind of SSD do you have? If you have one that supports TRIM, and you're using the generic microsoft storage drivers, then no, you're not getting everything out of your SSD. The generic windows drivers do not support TRIM. You absolutely want to install the newest Nvidia Storage Driver for your chipset.

 

Thanks for the reply I'm using the Crucial C300 128GB SSD, also using Win7 64 Bit.

So you think I should by default select all and install the drivers? I get the foloowing warning when I choose all options (storage driver) I get this. Pretty sure when I select this it shows my disk as being a scsi disk.



NVIDIA Storage Driver Information
----------------------------------
(WARNING - select CANCEL now if you do NOT want to install NVIDIA storage drivers)

The NVIDIA Storage driver consists of 3 components:

1) NVIDIA storage driver optimized for nForce SATA controller that will replace the driver that came with Windows.

2) A RAID controller driver which is required if SATA RAID is ENABLED in BIOS

3) RAID Manager application software

Note for Windows XP:

To install OS onto SATA disks when RAID is enabled in the BIOS, you MUST do the following:

- use the "-x" option with the package .exe to extract storage driver files
- follow instructions for Windows F6 install in "IDE\<os version>\driver\READMEF6.txt"

 

For my XPS 1340 I found it was best to use the Dell provided chipset drivers and the lastest video drivers off the Nvidia website (they include the HDMI audio drivers).

When I did this, the Windows score for the video would properly go up when the second video card was used. With this setup everything I ran to test that trim was working said it was on.

 

Ok, just updated the drivers, but as I was typing a reply my system froze for about 40 seconds as the disk activity light stayed lit solidly.

Will keep going but I'm sure this was the previous problem I had.

 

That's exactly what you're looking for. It's possible that the Dell drivers are just old, and are causing your problems. Try these ones: drivers nVidia nForce MCP79

 

YouTube - Dr Cox - Wrong Wrong Wrong Wrong

Right from the user manual for Intel SSD Toolbox (which is a program of little use in this case, but the information is still relevant)

 

Yes... Do Not install the storage driver from nvidia or your laptop will most likely not going to support trim...

 

Once I flashed the newer firmware on my PM800/PJB22 ssd making the drive support trim I wasn't planning on using the nvidia driver, but the chipset installer made it hard not to. But I found that when using the Dell provided nvidia chipset/sata drivers, every test I could do to check for trim support said it was working.

 

I just ran this command which shows that trim is enabled

fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify

 

I've used my laptop 3 times since updating the driver and three times the system has froze, the last time I had to force power down the system.

I've just disabled intel speedstep in the BIOS to see if that makes a difference as I've had issues with that in the past a long time ago, but normally that just caused lag.

Will let you know how I get on

 

Didn't make a difference, I've now rolled back the Nforce Sata driver, just using the basic windows one now.

 

I know it is working, but when i tried to install the nvidia storage driver, it gave me a warning that trim is not supported with dell's driver.