Help with Marvell BIOS with GA-P55A-UD3

[bytor]

Hi
I have a GA-P55A-UD3 just installed as part of a brand new PC. Not installed windows as of yet.

Couple of things. Using the MARVEL BIOS to setup a RAID aray with two new SAMSUNG HDD (identical).

Setting up as RAID 1

When going through the BIOS asks two questions:

1. Stripe size (have left at 64K - done a fair bit of research and that seems best option - any thoughts?)
2. Gigabyte Rounding - what is this. Searched and searched on google and can find very little info. User guide really unhelpful: "Select whether to permit the installation of a replacement drive that is smaller than the failed drive when performing a RAID 1 rebuild. Options include None, 1G and 10G"

What do these options mean??? Given I'm building a RAID 1 array this seems important!! I would use same disc size or larger probably.
Thanks for anyone who has ideas on this.

[Dark Mantis]

Hi and welcome to the Gigabyte Forum.
Firstly some bad news I'm afraid. The Marvell 9128 controlller chip won't handle a RAID array setup as the controller will just get overloaded and fall down taking your disks and data with it. We have done extensive tests with magnetic drives on this chip and along with other people have found out this is the unhelpful fact. I personally bought a couple of Western Digital Black SATA3 6Gbps to setup as a RAID only to have them fall over or not even be picked up in the first place.

[bytor]

Firstly - thanks for the prompt response - really appreciated.

Hmm. That's a bit of a pain! I bought the motherboard and drives with that in mind - thinking that the supposed added performance would speed up read/write to my shiny new HDDs.

So when you say it won't woth with RAID arrays, is that both RAID 0 and RAID 1? As it stands (prior to doing any RAID setup) the BIOS is picking up the HDDs - but this is a new build and no load has been put on the chipset. I ask this as the Gigabyte literature spins this as a selling point and even thr Gigabyte manual discussed how to set up a RAID 1 array.

It's RAID 1 that I want to setup. My key use of the PC is for photos. I take a lot of photos using a 21MP camera - so large disc and auto backup is key - hence the RAID1. Sounds like this is a hardware issue rather than s/w. Annoying!!

OK - given that is the case, is there any adantage of using the 9128 chipset with say optical drives? Or should I just leave them alone and stick with the vanilla items on the MOBO

Thanks

[absic]

Hi there,

As Dark Mantis has said there are some serious issues with using the Marvell Chipset in RAID but that doesn't mean that you can not do it. Although I don't run an Intel board I have managed to set-up a RAID 0 on the Marvell 9128 on my AMD GA-790XTA-UD4 Mobo.

If your HDD's are SATA2 you would probably be OK as I found that my Hitachi HDD's which are SATA2 were pretty pretty solid. I set-up a RAID 0 using the default stripe size (64K). I left the SATA3 mode as IDE as I did have issues if I tried setting it is AHCI.

There is a whole thread regarding the issues with Marvell 9128 Chip here: http://forum.giga-byte.co.uk/index.php/topic,2336.0.html

[Dark Mantis]

Just to add to absic's comments, there is no reason that you cant use the Intel ICH10R southbridge controlled ports for a SATA2 based RAID1 array. In fact the speeds are often better than you can get from the Marvell 9128 controlled SATA3 ports.

The problem with the Marvell SATA3 being pushed as a selling point was that nobody (not just Gigabyte, it is used on many makes) had done enough testing before launch and so were selling on the theoretical speeds and throuput.

[bytor]

Hi - once again guys, thanks for the prompt response. I'm new to a lot of this, so good advice is like gold dust!

I think I may have found my solution anyway to my personal circumstances. According to Gigabyte the specs for the 9128 chipset are as follows (taken from US site for GA-P55A-UD3 (rev 2.0)):

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Chipset:

   1. 6 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors (SATA2_0, SATA2_1, SATA2_2, SATA2_3, SATA2_4, SATA2_5) supporting up to 6 SATA 3Gb/s devices
   2. Support for SATA RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, and RAID 10

Marvell 9128 chip:

   1. 2 x SATA 6Gb/s connectors (GSATA3_6, GSATA3_7) supporting up to 2 SATA 6Gb/s devices
   2. Support for SATA RAID 0 and RAID 1

* SATA3 RAID 0 4x and SATA3 2x performance are maximum theoretical values. Actual performance may vary by system configuration.
* SATA3 SSDs are not recommended for use in RAID 0 mode on Marvell SE9128 ports.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So the key items from my point of view are that it (a) offers SATA 6Gb/s and (b) admits there are issues with a general kop out regarding system config

Now, when I check the specs for my SAMSUNG SPINPOINT F3
 

------------------------------------


Features

• MAX.500GB Formatted Capacity Per Disk
• Serial ATA 3.0Gbps Interface Support
• Improved recording stability over temperature with PMR
• Advanced dynamic FOD control for best data integrity
• Intelligent compensation of external disturbance
• SATA Native Command Queuing Feature
• Device Initiated SATA Power Management
• Rotational vibration sensor
• Environment friendly product with RoHS compliance
• Improved performance with dual-ARM based firmware
• ATA S.M.A.R.T. Compliant
• ATA Automatic Acoustic Management Feature
• ATA 48-bit Address Feature
• ATA Device Configuration Overlay Feature
• NoiseGuard™
• SilentSeek™


------------------------------------

From the above I can see that the SAMSUNG drive only support 3Gb/s - so for these hard drives, there would be no point using the Marvell chipset as the HDDs can't operate at 6 Gb/s. So I think I'll just revert to Intel ICH10R controlled ports. Do you agree with my logic?

Second question I have though is this:

SATA2 = 3 Gb/s
SATA3 = 6 Gb/s

Is the above assumption correct???

Thanks again for all the help. This is a brand new PC and I want to complete the build today if I can!

Thanks

[absic]

From the above I can see that the SAMSUNG drive only support 3Gb/s - so for these hard drives, there would be no point using the Marvell chipset as the HDDs can't operate at 6 Gb/s. So I think I'll just revert to Intel ICH10R controlled ports. Do you agree with my logic?

Yes, your logic seems sound and, from what I understand, the Intel Controller is the better option.

SATA2 = 3 Gb/s
SATA3 = 6 Gb/s

This is also correct.

[Dark Mantis]

Second question I have though is this:

SATA2 = 3 Gb/s
SATA3 = 6 Gb/s

Is the above assumption correct???

Yes I am afraid Gigabyte confuses things by not using the industry standard notation for the SATA devices. It still insists on calling it SATA3 instead of the recognised SATA6 but as long as everyone here understands the difference then there are no problems.

[bytor]

Thanks guys for all the help.

I'm going to setup my SAMSUNG Sinpoint F3 drives in a RAID 1 array using the Marvel 9128 Controlled SATA3 ports and see how I go.

I'm not going to spend ages on it since the the SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 drives are SATA2 - and will gain little if any performance over using the "standard" SATA2 ports on the MOBO. If I get issues I will revert to the standard SATA ports.

I will keep you posted on how I go as the more info on this topic the better for future reference.

Thanks for all the advice and tips.

Cheers

[bytor]

OK - so I attached both Samsung Spinpoint F3 drives to the Intel SATA ports. Given that they both only operate at 3Gbp/s I don't see the point in attaching to the 6Gb/s ports. Other thing, if you go down the 6GBp/s option, you lose performance on the PCI-E interface. So all up, bit pointelss in my book.

Then setup RAID1 as documented in the MOBO manual and all good. Then installed Windows 7 - 64 BIT without issue. All working great and very happy with everything. Only issue (I thought) was that PC switched off by itself. I thought - oh no, cooling issue. Then I realised that sleep was ON, set at 30min! Fingers crossed it all works without issue going forward.

Thanks to all those who offered up help - much appreciated.

All good now!

[Dark Mantis]

Thanks for the update. As an aside I just wanted to mention that Marvell have just released a new firmware/driver for the 9128 chip and it has been incorporated into the latest BIOS updates for many boards so maybe we will see an improved usefullness in this controller(fingers crossed)