Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R (rev 2) - Possible to boot to PCIe SATA III card?

[freeradicalx]

In an attempt to speed up my aging CustoMac Pro 2010 I picked up a Crucial M500 SSD, only to learn that my GA-X58A-UD3R's onboard Marvell 9128 Sata III controller doesn't perform that well on OS X (Was getting about 140MB/s from the SSD). Looking for a better-supported alternative I bought an Apricorn Velocity Solo X2 PCIe SATA III card with the faster "second version" Marvell 9128 controller. The SSD now flies around 480MB/s when connected through the card... But I can't boot off of it because as far as I can tell Chameleon can't see the SSD behind the Apricorn card, nor can the BIOS.

I've scoured the BIOS settings and see no option that might get the board to register the SSD. There is a "Bootable add-on card" option in the boot menu but that doesn't help me because I need to boot through Chameleon on my USB stick and Chameleon doesn't have a similar option. Haven't tried installing Windows on the SSD yet to see if this option would work otherwise.

Does anyone know how to do this? Isn't the BIOS supposed to be able to see the SSD behind the SATA controller? Is there custom firmware required to make this work or is there some trick in Chameleon I don't know about? Or did I just waste $80 on a card that would have been better spent on a new mobo and cpu?

 

[waipeinan]

im interested in this too... and if it ca be made to work is there a real speed advantage?

 

[Jamesbond007]

In an attempt to speed up my aging CustoMac Pro 2010 I picked up a Crucial M500 SSD, only to learn that my GA-X58A-UD3R's onboard Marvell 9128 Sata III controller doesn't perform that well on OS X (Was getting about 140MB/s from the SSD). Looking for a better-supported alternative I bought an Apricorn Velocity Solo X2 PCIe SATA III card with the faster "second version" Marvell 9128 controller. The SSD now flies around 480MB/s when connected through the card... But I can't boot off of it because as far as I can tell Chameleon can't see the SSD behind the Apricorn card, nor can the BIOS.

I've scoured the BIOS settings and see no option that might get the board to register the SSD. There is a "Bootable add-on card" option in the boot menu but that doesn't help me because I need to boot through Chameleon on my USB stick and Chameleon doesn't have a similar option. Haven't tried installing Windows on the SSD yet to see if this option would work otherwise.

Does anyone know how to do this? Isn't the BIOS supposed to be able to see the SSD behind the SATA controller? Is there custom firmware required to make this work or is there some trick in Chameleon I don't know about? Or did I just waste $80 on a card that would have been better spent on a new mobo and cpu?

Why don't you just connect the Crucial SSD to one of the six SATA ports from the Intel chipset? Yes, it will be slightly slower since they are only SATA2 and not SATA3, but it will still be much faster than a normal HDD and your computer BIOS should be able to see the SSD this way.