GA-X58A-UD3R SATA 3 and VERTEX 3

[Wonderwrench]

Yup they use 2 Marvell 9128 controller chips and a PCI-E 4x connection. Should be faster than onboard solutions on X58 boards but still crippled.

Bill

[Aussie Allan]

 Explain crippled!

  Aussie Allan

[Wonderwrench]

The Marvell 9128 controller was never designed to support SSD's. If you use one of the latest SATA 3 SSD's on any Marvell  controller available today it will limit its performance.  The Marvell  controllers just can't handle the bandwidth and massive IOPS.

Bill

[Aussie Allan]

The Marvell 9128 controller was never designed to support SSD's. If you use one of the latest SATA 3 SSD's on any Marvell  controller available today it will limit its performance.  The Marvell  controllers just can't handle the bandwidth and massive IOPS.

Bill

  Either was the ICH10R which out performs the 9128, 2:1...so what Sata ports do you recommend using for SSD then ? .... None!... We just have a new bottleneck in the industry that developers/manufactures are just going to have to work through.

 Marvells next implementation, we know as the 9182 has reported to have ironed out more bugs but still lacks the performance that 6GB/S SataIII invokes in all of us, Marketing departments have been ruthless on this mark where most people I talk too can't understand why they pay the premium buying Sata III equipment and are then convinced there's something wrong because there not getting the performance the salesmen stated ...SataIII ( 6GB/s)  is theoretical...... and probably won't be achieved for some time yet from a single drive, SSD or otherwise.

 Where there has been marked improvement is PCI-X based drives.... I have one (RevoDrive X2) that is to be honest, pretty amazing, at bog stock settings , I was enjoying 600mb/s write and 800mb/s read out of the box and they tout 120,000 IOPS ....Cool!

  Marvell have something else up there sleeve similar in nature to Seagate's Momentus XT Hybrid drive with the 9130 chip/controller..... have a read about it here:   http://www.marvell.com/products/storage/storage_system_solutions/sata_controllers_pc_consumer/hyper_duo_productbrief.pdf

Effectively connecting up a SSD and a HDD to the same controller....Result!......80% of SSD performance with all the storage of the Platter drive....reducing costs by a factor of 300%..... Things just get more exciting every day!

 Aussie Allan

[Dark Mantis]

There is a lot of innovations around at the moment like the Marvell one Allan just posted the link to and the Momentus along with upgrades to SSD technology. It is all helping to bring down the price and speed up the performance so that it is available to more people.

[Aussie Allan]

 Too right DM, I have one of those XTs in the laptop now .... way cool!

  AA

[Dark Mantis]

I wasn't aware that they did it in 2.5" drives as well. How does that compare to the standard drive then ?

[Aussie Allan]

  DM......I wasn't aware that they did it in a 3.5" .....they look no different to a standard 9mm thick 2.5 laptop drive, but that's where it ends, inside you have 4GB of Flash NAND Storage, with the adaptive learning capability of the drive, they fly buy the 3rd boot, the more you use them in a repetitive many with the programs you use regularly the faster thing go.....250, 320 and 500Gb ........you can pick the 500s up for about 88 squid now including and delivery.  if you need any more info ....yell!

 Aussie Allan

 

[Wonderwrench]

The Marvell 9128 controller was never designed to support SSD's. If you use one of the latest SATA 3 SSD's on any Marvell  controller available today it will limit its performance.  The Marvell  controllers just can't handle the bandwidth and massive IOPS.

Bill

  Either was the ICH10R which out performs the 9128, 2:1...so what Sata ports do you recommend using for SSD then ? .... None!... We just have a new bottleneck in the industry that developers/manufactures are just going to have to work through.

 Marvells next implementation, we know as the 9182 has reported to have ironed out more bugs but still lacks the performance that 6GB/S SataIII invokes in all of us, Marketing departments have been ruthless on this mark where most people I talk too can't understand why they pay the premium buying Sata III equipment and are then convinced there's something wrong because there not getting the performance the salesmen stated ...SataIII ( 6GB/s)  is theoretical...... and probably won't be achieved for some time yet from a single drive, SSD or otherwise.

 Where there has been marked improvement is PCI-X based drives.... I have one (RevoDrive X2) that is to be honest, pretty amazing, at bog stock settings , I was enjoying 600mb/s write and 800mb/s read out of the box and they tout 120,000 IOPS ....Cool!

  Marvell have something else up there sleeve similar in nature to Seagate's Momentus XT Hybrid drive with the 9130 chip/controller..... have a read about it here:   http://www.marvell.com/products/storage/storage_system_solutions/sata_controllers_pc_consumer/hyper_duo_productbrief.pdf

Effectively connecting up a SSD and a HDD to the same controller....Result!......80% of SSD performance with all the storage of the Platter drive....reducing costs by a factor of 300%..... Things just get more exciting every day!

 Aussie Allan

If you are using a board with SATA II or Marvell SATA III controllers of any kind as of today the latest SATA III SSD's will not perform as they should because they will be bottle necked by the controller. I'm using the Intel SATA II controller on rig in my sig as it feels faster than the Marvell 9128. SATA II caps out at about 267 megs a second. The Marvell in the low 400's. Several new SATA III SSD's have sequential reads/writes of over 500 megs per second. To see the full potential of any decent SATA III SSD will require a new motherboard or a $360 USD addon card.

I take it you mean PCI-E not PCI-X? PCI-X is use only on server class boards as far as I know.

Hybrid drives are only a stop gap measure until SSD prices come down. They are only useful for people that use their PC's in a repetitious manner and do not manipulate large data sets.

Bill

[Aussie Allan]

 Hay ya Bill

  The "X" was supposed to be subjective, as in put whatever ya want in!

 I for the life of me can't understand the low "267 Mb/s" you state through the Intel controller of your motherboard you stated as MAX , you might have a problem with your set-up as I had 440Mb/s on the ICH10R  with 6 really old spin points raided on the same controller you stated.

 And a new motherboard to get around the present bottleneck........Unless I've missed something , I don't know of any board on the market that can perform unmodified to a high end SSDs full potential......PCI-(*) has the bandwidth right now.........

  You also might want to change supplier for your addon cards......I just not 6 weeks ago purchased a RocketRaid 640 6gb/s supported card for way less then half of what your stating...........infact if you only need 2 sata ports you can cut that in half again with the 622 card, again 6gb/s compliant.

  Try and keep an open mind on Hybrid drives as it's not the black and white subject going off your rigid statement. I ordered and paid for 1 unit some months back and the silly buggers sent me 3!  I can assure you from  experience that they work no slower then any 7200rpm drive on the market and any program I have opened before, load quite a bit quicker,widows boots faster and a virus scan literally flies ! At about 16 pence a gig..........I think them very good value for money, but each to there own!

 Aussie Allan

[Wonderwrench]

The X, Ok I get it.

The 267 megs per second figure is per drive aka single drive. The ICH10R can handle much more in RAID mode as each channel can handle approx 267 megs per second.

I understand the RocketRaid cards are much cheaper than the LSI card I linked to. Duh forgot the link in my last post. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118107 The RocketRaid card should be better than the single 9128 controller on older X58 boards like mine but its not the ultimate solution as it would still limit bandwidth. The new Marvell 88SE9182 controller on new X58 boards looks to be much improved and may be better than the RocketRaid 640 cards. I could find no reviews testing the new Marvell 88SE9182 controller with a second gen SATA III SSD. An updated RocketRaid card using the Marvell 88SE9182 controller may fill the need completely for X58 users that want to see the full potential of a fast SATA III SSD if it does not cap bandwidth. We will not know for sure until someone does the testing.

On the hybrid drive subject I have a 320 gig Momentus XT in a box less than 5 feet from me. It was in the wife's laptop until recently. It did what it was meant to do which was replace a 320 gig 5400 rpm drive with the fastest drive available for the money spent.  The laptop now has my old Intel X-25M G2 80 gig drive in it and it is so much faster than the XT its not even funny.  Sure there was a huge loss in capacity but she has no need for anything larger at this point in time. The draw back with the XT's are the limited size of the flash memory and the flash being used for reads only. Even Intel's Fast Response tech available on the new Z68 boards can't really compete with a fast SSD. It comes much closer than an XT does but in the end you still sacrifice performance for capacity. See review here. http://www.anandtech.com/show/4329/intel-z68-chipset-smart-response-technology-ssd-caching-review

Bill

[skan]

Then Gigabyte cheated us selling motherboards and telling that they have a 6Gb/s Sata port.
And you cannot say that you didn't now it before, all manufacturers make tests, but you concealed the results.
I'm very upset about that.
I'm another disappointed Gibabyte customer.  First I had many problems with the memory, and now, I would like to use my Samsung 840 Pro, and I can only use it at half speed.
What else?