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alialmatouq

3 Posts

55249

August 29th, 2013 10:00

Is there a way for making an ssd hard drive to work on an Inspiron E1405 with AHCI enabled?

Recently I bough a new samsung 256gb 840pro ssd drive for my E1405, but I discovered that the bios does not give the option for booting on AHCI mode which is needed for the new drive.  Is there a way out for this limitation or I just need to live with it?

alialmatouq

3 Posts

August 29th, 2013 15:00

Thanks Jackshack.  

It did actually work and its much faster than my old drive.  However, I felt disappointed because the sequential read and write speeds was around 120 as opposed to my desktop computer, which is AHCI enabled intel i5 core with 6GB RAM on Windows 7, that uses the same drive was around 250 Mb/s.  

By the way, if you don't mind answering, how come with AHCI enabled, the sequential speeds are much less than the maximum possible speeds of 540/530 Mb/s, even though my desktop computer is much more newer than my laptop?  What are the possible bottlenecks in this case?

Regards.

jackshack

6.4K Posts

August 29th, 2013 15:00

With your laptop, the actual interface to Windows is the IDE standard, which is limited to about 120 MB/sec.  When we were still using PATA drives, that rate was considered "Ultra ATA", as the max rate before that was 100 MB/sec.  You notice an improvement because the 120 MB/sec is still a lot faster than the maximum data transfer rate you get with a rotating platter.  Data rates with a mechanical drive varies from about 30 MB/sec to 90 MB/sec, depending on whether you are on the inner tracks or the outer tracks.

The interface speed on your desktop doesn't have the same limitation as does your laptop, but the SSD itself may have a limitation.  Some of the literature refers to the later SATA specifications as a solution awaiting a problem.  Mass storage device hardware simply hasn't kept up with the data rate capabilities of the interface to which it is attached.

alialmatouq

3 Posts

August 29th, 2013 16:00

Thanks again.  Appreciate  your useful reply.  Maybe I need to do more research to find out why my desktop drive is performing way below optimum speed.

jackshack

6.4K Posts

August 29th, 2013 15:00

The E1405/640M was produced before AHCI drivers became common.  It's motherboard uses an IDE to SATA bridge to accommodate using the SATA hard drives with older operating systems that had drivers only for the PATA/IDE architecture.  There are no SATA drivers available for this computer, nor could you use them if there were.

You might still be able to use the disk, but without the AHCI there is no way to make use of any special features, such as TRIM.

Opt-e-Tech

12 Posts

April 16th, 2014 13:00

For forum reference- Recently (April 2014) clean installed Dell OEM Win7 Pro 32bit on a Crucial M500 240GB SSD in a 2006 Inspiron E1405. Win7 install process set the DisableDeleteNotify key in the Registry to zero (=0) indicating it recognized the drive as an SSD and enabled TRIM. Using the TRIMcheck validation utility, the utility reports TRIM is functioning. The SSD is operating in IDE mode as opposed to AHCI so performance on the SATA 1 interface is constrained from what it would be with the AHCI Native Command Queuing (NCQ) feature. As most have observed and reported, selection of AHCI mode is not available in the Dell A10 BIOS for the E1405. Research indicates the Intel southbridge I/O Controller Hub ICH7-M of the 945GM chipset in the E1405 does indeed support AHCI. The ICH7-M (M=mobile) is one of few in the ICH7 family that supports AHCI, however, it does not support RAID so is somewhat unique in only supporting AHCI. Dell appears to have deliberately removed the I/O mode selection from the BIOS. Hazard a guess that somewhere along the line Dell made the decision to remove the I/O mode selection from the BIOS because it was provoking too many support calls. The E1405 is a Win XP era platform and Win XP did not have an AHCI driver in the Microsoft WinXP driver database as Win7 now does. If WinXP was reinstalled without the out-of-box-installed Intel Matrix Storage software but was set in AHCI mode you'd encounter a show stopper exception. The E1405 was a very popular laptop. Have seen it in TV commercials and shows. Even so, being an aged platform, although there are probably a lot of them out there, doubt Dell would be receptive to revisiting the E1405 BIOS so the ICH7-M's AHCI capability could be enabled. Hope this helps make sense of the situation.

Anonymous User

1 Message

August 21st, 2014 04:00

I actually wish dell will release BIOS update for this problem, Most of the hard disks in this Laptops are now being replaced with new ones as they get failed with time and now it is mostly being replaced with SSDs, I have the same laptop and Im running it from a Samsung SSD with Windows 7. Unfortunately there is no way to enable to AHCI to get the full potential of the SSD. My laptop actually shipped with windows vista, as far as i know windows vista has this AHCI capability.

ejn63

1 Rookie

 • 

87.5K Posts

August 23rd, 2014 05:00

Early SATA systems were built with IDE bridges -- even with a BIOS update, AHCI mode cannot be enabled on them.

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