NForce SATA drivers

NForce motherboard, with SSD drives (or who just want SMART to work), and Windows 7:

Go into Device Manager and find the NVidia SATA controllers. Click Update Driver, tell it to let you choose from a list and switch it to "Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller", which should be included in the short list of compatible drivers Windows presents. You'll then have to reboot.

Windows 7 will now actually know that your drive is an SSD an optimize itself accordingly. You'll also be able to use TRIM properly (if your drive supports it), and use SMART monitoring tools (other than CrystalDiskInfo which is about the only thing clever enough to access SMART via the NVidia drivers), and stuff like the Intel SSD Toolbox, which couldn't talk to the drive before. Apparently it also massively increases performance, at least with SSDs.

All this because NVidia are still being ****ing ********s and making their IDE/SATA drivers present the drives to the OS as SCSI, which breaks just about everything except basic file access. I wish NVidia would admit that this was a bad idea and stop it, but you can stop it yourself by switching to Microsoft's generic driver and it seems that there are only upsides to doing so.

PS: You can tell if Windows 7 knows your drive is an SSD or not by whether or not it offers to schedule defrags for it. If you click the Schedule button in the defrag tool it should list the drives with checkboxes next to them, excluding any SSD drives. With the NVidia drivers my SSD was listed; with the Microsoft drivers it is not, as should be the case.

PPS: Just had a thought: You probably shouldn't do this if you're using NVidia's RAID stuff. Not sure if it'll still work under the generic drivers.