Help with X58 mobo and SATA III

[dopethrone]

My system is a couple years old.  Lately I’ve been having stability issues, and I’m not knowledgeable enough to diagnose the problem without quite a bit of research.  I’ve also been meaning to finally upgrade to an SSD for my main drive (I’m running Windows 7). 

I was all set to pull the trigger on a new 240gb SSD when I found out that, apparently, the SATA III controller (Marvell 9128) on my motherboard (gigabyte ga-x58a-ud3r) is garbage.  After lurking on this and other forums, I see a lot of recommendations to completely avoid the Marvell, opting instead for the SATA II controller (Intel ich10r), which is much more stable, and likely just as fast or faster.  Obviously still a major upgrade over my HDD, but I’d prefer SATA III.

Some people have advised me that the Marvell controller can actually work well if I get certain unofficial drivers from www.station-drivers.com, or something along those lines.  I’m reluctant to do this.  Does anyone have any experience using the non-official Marvell drivers, or any drivers that are supposedly more up to date than what’s available on the manufacturer’s website?

I realized that I could RAID 0 two SSD’s on the Intel controller and achieve the read/write speeds I was originally hoping for, but I’d prefer to have TRIM support.  I have heard that the garbage collection on certain SSD’s is good enough to negate the need for TRIM.  Any thoughts on this?

Has anyone tried PCIe SATA III cards?  Do these support TRIM?  Are they suitable for use with a main drive?  I’ve been considering picking up this the Rocket 640 PCIe Raid card, and just using it with one SSD.


Any advice at all would be greatly appreciated; all of this stuff is over my head.

[Dark Mantis]

Hi and welcome.

Firstly what you have read about the Marvell 9128 controller chip is correct on these boards. They will work fine as SATA2, so with optical drives and ordinary data storage drives there shouldn't be any problem. However they cannot be relied upon for the faster throughput of SATA3 SSDs or RAID0 arrays. I have personally tested this out and know it to be a fact. I wouldn't expect any drivers official or otherwise to make a significant difference.

Don't get bogged down too much with this issue though. The Intel ICH10R southbridge ports are very fast and if you instal a SSD on the SATA2_0 port it will still be a huge increase in speed over what you have been used to and you can use TRIM. Some makes will be very efficient when it come to using Garbage Collection and so don't ignore that as worthless.

The dedicated PCIE SATA3 cards can work very well and if you really must have this option then it is worth looking at. There are several threads on the forum where these have been discused.

[dopethrone]

Thanks for the response Mantis!

I wouldn't expect any drivers official or otherwise to make a significant difference.

Got it.  I'll ditch that idea.

The dedicated PCIE SATA3 cards can work very well and if you really must have this option then it is worth looking at. There are several threads on the forum where these have been

I did look around a bit before starting this thread, but I really only found a couple discussions about PCIe SATA III.  It seems like you are implying that this option is not worth the while, although I'm not sure why.  It seems like I will get significant improvements, no?  Can I still rely on TRIM support?

Thanks again for the info.

[dopethrone]

I'm also looking for some additional reassurances about the Rocket 640 expansion card.  Some people on newegg said you can't boot Windows 7 64bit from it.  Other people said on some motherboards, booting to a SATA III PCIe card will impact graphics card performance.  These are the kinds of things that are over my head.  Does anyone have experience using an expansion card to get around the SATA III limitations of this board?

[Dark Mantis]

The dedicated PCIE SATA3 cards can work very well and if you really must have this option then it is worth looking at. There are several threads on the forum where these have been

I did look around a bit before starting this thread, but I really only found a couple discussions about PCIe SATA III.  It seems like you are implying that this option is not worth the while, although I'm not sure why.  It seems like I will get significant improvements, no?  Can I still rely on TRIM support?

No, I am not trying to put you off the idea at all. I was merely saying that if you require SATA3 then these cards can be good. I haven't used one myself so can't comment personally but Aussie Allan and a few others are using them. TRIM should be available whenb using one of these cards.

I am using a similar idea in that the Revodrive is a PCIE storage device that is bootable and I find that brilliant. It is even faster than SSDs and apart from the price I couldn't fault it.

[dopethrone]

Got it.  Thank you Mantis.

[cjapeterborough]

My understanding is that a lot of the addon PCI-E sata cards only support PCI-E x1 and in order to get the bandwidth for SATA3 speeds the
card needs to support PCI-E x4 which are a lot more expensive.

I myself made this mistake there are a lot of cheap PCI-E cards around supposedly SATA3 but in fact are probably slower than ICH10 Sata2