For what it's worth!
I wish I had one of these new iSSD boards to really try out and go through all of the chips on the board ...... although the specs state only a single Marvell 88SE9172 controller is in place, which I don't doubt, ....as this is the chip replacing the problematic 9128 on the X58/67 boards which sadly struggled to deliver even satisfactory SATAII performance.........But........
The whole point of the smallish iSSD module being placed onboard is supposedly to improve performance of the Hard Drive (Glass Platter) installed for the OS......60% speed improvements claimed over the standard HD driven hardware configuration.........this sound very familiar to Marvell's new HyperDuo driven controller tagged 88SE9130.
Marvell Touts an 80% speed improvements with a combined SSD, and a standard glass plattered drive connected..........shunting/buffering the most commonly accessed data to the SSD while still utilizing the full drive size of the combined hardware installed........is there a 9130 chip sandwiched in here somewhere?
On top of all this ,this sounds dangerously close (infringement) to Seagate's "Momentus XT" Drive which carry's 4GB of fast NAND FLASH onboard to do just about the same thing!
Marvell have upped the ante, releasing a string of chips onto the market, 9120, 25/27/28/30 and 9172 to name just a few......... there filtering down right across all the board manufactures ..... even hard drives carry Marvell chips.
To get back to the subject........I suspect Gigabyte have done there homework in that like the Momentus XT, very little SSD storage is required to bump up performance substantially..........another point is why did they make it (iSSD) a removable module and not just integrate it into the motherboard ?
Upgrade-ability! ..... if there's a hardware problem, new modules can be shipped easily........if larger modules aid system performance in the near future......the design is a winner for upgrades.
Aussie Allan
