On my trip to MicroCenter to purchase several SSD drive's I thought I need more 6G Sata ports after talking with the salesman. He recommened th P8Z77-V Deluxe as it had 4 of them and 4 3G ports.

 

When I got back home and looked I realized I already had the 4 6G ports on my old MB.

 

Question now is should I make the change or drive back the 100 miles to return the new board?

 

Thanks

Rick S.

 

Question now is should I make the change or drive back the 100 miles to return the new board?

 

 

If you have the ports already, no need to drive back down to Microcenter.

On my trip to MicroCenter to purchase several SSD drive's I thought I need more 6G Sata ports after talking with the salesman. He recommened th P8Z77-V Deluxe as it had 4 of them and 4 3G ports.

 

When I got back home and looked I realized I already had the 4 6G ports on my old MB.

 

Question now is should I make the change or drive back the 100 miles to return the new board?

 

Thanks

Rick S.

 

If you really want to save some $$ then go ahead, drive 100 miles (the cost of fuel vs. the cost of the board may make the trip utterly redundant ) back to microcenter and return the board, but I highly recommend keeping it, it's a great board, and when the time comes for you to upgrade your processor, you won't have much of an issue with the Z77 unit.

If I understood correctly, it's 100 miles one way, which makes it a 200 mile round trip. Save the fuel money, save a board

You should have never gone searching for more 6GB/s ports Rick.

Yes, most Z77 boards have 4 of them, 2 Intel and 2 Marvel, but never use the Marvel ones for SSD's. They actually perform worse than Intel's 3GB/s ports

Okay, thanks guys.

 

$250+ would be worth the 200 mile trip and the hassle of redoing my working OC. Is there any current benefit of installing this MB or is it only a potential future plus?

 

So don't use the Marvel even with a normal 7200 HDD and the third SSD? The Z77 claims to have ASUS SSD caching on the Marvel ports; whatever that is; used in conjunction with a HDD.

 

Thanks

Rick S.

s there any current benefit of installing this MB or is it only a potential future plus?

 

No real benefit at the moment BUT, you do have the option of upgrading to IB and taking advantage of PCIe3 in the future...

 

 

So don't use the Marvel even with a normal 7200 HDD and the third SSD?

 

Esentially, it would be best if you put a piece of tape over the Marvell ports on the mobo. :lol:

Man, you are cruel! I had planned on running a dual boot 3 SSD drives with OS/FSX/Other programs with my old HHD 250OS/500Prgs and a 1T downloads/data/bu etc HDD drive. I also run a 3T USB3 drive for SimSavvy scenery. I would have loved to keep my other 2 HDD 250/500 for other projects.

 

So can I use the Marvel for HDD's if not SSD's?

 

Thanks

Rick S.

 

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Esentially, it would be best if you put a piece of tape over the Marvell ports on the mobo.

So can I use the Marvel for HHD's if not SSD's?

 

I'd get out the soldering iron and remove the Marvell controller from your motherboard.... :LMAO:

 

In all seriousness, I would use the Marvell controller ports ONLY for stuff like Disk Drives or slow HDDs.

I starting to get the feeling you don't much like the Marvel controller Ben.

 

I'd get out the soldering iron and remove the Marvell controller from your motherboard.... :LMAO:

Yeah, use the SSD's in Intelports, even if they are SATA2 ports. Regular mech hard drives are ok running off the marvel controller.

As for the Marvel SSD cache, you only use a couple dozen GB as a cache, you would be left running the remaining 200GB off the slow controller, that last time I checked, doesn't support TRIM.

Okay, makes sense. Now, what about IDE vs AHCI. I know that I have to use AHCI to manage the SSD's. But I would like to use some of my older data HDD's that were set up using IDE. WIll they coexist?

 

Thanks

Rick S.

Yes, no problem. Set the Intel controllers to AHCI and you can use the remaining port with a mech HDD in AHCI mode.

 

And just in case: If you port your Windows install to an SSD, set the controller to AHCI, and if the OS was installed in IDE mode, you'll get a blue screen

 

check this out (scroll dow for the fix)

 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976

Thanks Dazz, but I am not quite sure I understand. If I set up my SSD's under AHCI will I be able to read my older IDE drives? I know I can't boot to an IDE under AHCI, but getting old data would be nice.

 

Thanks

Rick S.

Thanks Dazz, but I am not quite sure I understand. If I set up my SSD's under AHCI will I be able to read my older IDE drives? I know I can't boot to an IDE under AHCI, but getting old data would be nice.

 

Thanks

Rick S.

 

You can do both. HDD's work the same in IDE & in AHCI, and if you want to boot to a drive that contains a Windows OS install performed in IDE, you can still switch to AHCI following the instructions in that link

Got it, thanks.