Gigabyte 1 : Western Digital 0
OK I am big enough to admit it when I get things wrong and with help from other members of the forum I think I now have a better understanding of the situation and the major problems with the Marvell 9128 SATA3 interface. DON'T use SATA3 6GB/s HDD's use SATA2 3GB/s HDD's instead.
This morning I once again reconfigured my PC but, instead of trying to use the Western Digital 640 GB SATA3 6GB/s HDD's (thanks for the heads up on that one Pierre!) I utilised my two Hitachi Deskstar 1TB SATA2 3GB/s HDD's. I set-up the Marvell 9128 for a RAID 0 Array and am currently testing the system for stability. So far everything seems to be working well.
Now, I am a realist and I don't for one minute expect to obtain the 4X speed improvement with RAID 0 using mechanical HDD's but, as you can see from the following picture, I have managed to improve the Read/Write speeds considerably.
Previously I had only been able to get my SATA3 6GB/s HDD to run in IDE mode on the Marvell 9128 Chip with the following result:
This actually improves the throughput by about 2X and personally I feel this is acceptable. The one downside of this is that the only way I have been able to get Disk information from the Marvell Array is to use the Marvell Raid Utility, no biggie really and that's one of the things it is there for.
Connecting the Western Digital SATA3 6GB/s HDD's to the SATA2 ports on my motherboard actually sees them gain in Read/Write capabilities as well, only about 20MB/s but it is still better than on the SATA3 ports!
Therefore, I have to conclude that the problem isn't with the Marvell 9128 Chip but with some of the popular SATA3 6GB/s HDD's that are widely available from Western Digital. If any company is to blame I think we should really be looking there not at Gigabyte.
The big issue here is once again with the way things are being advertised. As consumers we expect great things when we see numbers such as "
SATA3 6GB/s Twice the Speed of SATA2 3GB/s" being bandied about or "
4X speed improvement over RAID 0 on SATA2". I believe that these speeds are achievable but only if you invest in expensive SSD's and this is the problem. In the race to sell products, manufacturers neglect to paint the whole picture and we are led to believe in things by intimation rather than by fact. The old caveat "Buyer beware" springs to mind. I don't think that I am particularly stupid and, before investing in my current PC, I spent a lot of time researching yet I fell for the hype too. I honestly thought that putting SATA3 6GB/s HDD's onto the SATA3 ports, would result in an overall system improvement....wrong!
By setting up a RAID 0 array on the Marvell 9128 Chip using SATA2 HDD's I have managed to get approximately 2X faster speeds and the system, so far, seems to be a very happy bunny. When I can afford to invest in a couple of SSD's I will be looking for 4X speed but until then and with the limitations of Mechanical Hard drives, I will live with the 2X speed that I have now got.
