HP Pavilion dv7-6103ei AHCI/RAID?

[GregBester]

Hi all, 

Greetings from a first poster.

I have a Pavilion DV7-6103ei laptop and it has been retrofitted with a Samsung PM810/series-470 128GB SSD along with a 1TB HDD in the second bay.  

I'm not necessarily interested in a RAID configuration, but I would prefer the disks to run in AHCI mode.  However, I see that the BIOS does not support changing the interface to AHCI. 

I have done some research and it looks like these laptops do not support AHCI.  Is this correct?  I am not able to find information on RAID either, which enables AHCI when there is no RAID configuration present.

I have intel Rapid Storage Technology installed.

Is my only option to run these hard drives in IDE mode?  Seems a bit primative for such a powerful laptop.  

If anyone can advise me on a workaround or a way to achieve AHCI mode, please let me know.

Thanks.

Greg

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi, Greg:

Unfortunately, the BIOS' storage controller settings in HP consumer notebooks cannot be changed.

Most likely your model is set by default to RAID and the easy way to tell whether or not your drive controller is set to RAID or AHCI is to go to the device manager.

If there is an IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers category, click to expand that and you will see an Intel SATA AHCI controller listed there.

If the BIOS is set to RAID, there will be a Storage Controllers category and when you click to expand that, you will see an Intel SATA RAID controller listed there.

Those would be the only 2 settings your notebook's storage controller is defaulted to.

It is definitely not set to IDE.

[GregBester]

Thanks for the quick reply, Paul.

You were right.  There is indeed an Intel Mobile Express Chipset SATA AHCI Controller under IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers in the Device Manager.  I have attached a screen shot image.  What's curious is that under disk drives both the SSD and HDD show up as SCSI disk devices.  Is this correct?

The reason why I posted this question in the first place is that I determined through the Drives Meter desktop gadget that all of my drives are running on the IDE interface.  Please see the attached image of that screenshot.  Could it be the gadget is just misinformed?

Please let me know if I'm being a moron!

Greg

[GregBester]

Oh, one more thing...

What also got me on this quest was that I wanted to update the firmware on the Samsung SSD via the Samsung Magician application.  When starting the software it is unable to see the Samsung SSD despite, as you can see, it being seen by Windows.  It gives an error like "There is no Samsung SSD detected in this system".  This made me think that it was not running in AHCI mode which let me to investgate via the Drives Meter gadget.

Apparently Magician will not work if the drives are not running in AHCI mode.

Greg 

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

You're very welcome, Greg.

Your notebooks BIOS is indeed set to AHCI and unfortunately, I would not know why the HDD is labeled as a scsi device.

I guess it is just the name Windows assigned to the drive.  I have seen this before on other PC's.

You may want to install the latest Intel RST driver from Intel and see if that makes a difference in anything.

3rd file listed.  Also has the achi drivers too.

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?DwnldID=24006

[GregBester]

Thanks again, Paul.  I'm pretty sure I installed the latest version but I'll reinstall again to see if it makes any difference.  Glad to know my drives are running on the ACHI interface.

Not that there's been any poor performance.  It boots in about 13 seconds!  Windows performance index is about 6.9.

I'm a first time HP laptop user, btw, and I must say this laptop is fantastic!  Even if it is 2 years old...

Greg

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Anytime, Grag.

Glad to have been of assistance.

The good news is since the BIOS is set to AHCI, the SSD will have support for TRIM.

Glad you like your HP notebook.

Mine is old but still works great.

I installed an Intel 330 120 GB SSD in my HP Elitebook 6930p business notebook and it works great even as a SATA III HDD in a notebook that only has a SATA II port.

[GregBester]

Hmm, unfortunately it says "Platform not supported" when I tried to install the RAID driver.

Greg

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

I just looked at the drivers in that file and they are too new for your PC and do not include the drivers for the sata ahci controller your notebook has.

See if this one works...I see that it has the driver for your controller...

https://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?DwnldID=22676&lang=eng&ProdId=2101

[GregBester]

Same thing with this one...

I'll keep going down the list.

Greg