GA-Z68XP-UD4 | SSDs shown as IDE in BIOS, but running at SATA3 speed

[Myopic]

Hi, 

On my Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD4 motherboard I have the following devices on SATA ports:
0_SATA3 SSD Samsung 850 Pro 512GB Sata3 - System C:
1_SATA3 SSD SanDisk Ultra II 240GB Sata3 - Render F:
2_SATA2
3_SATA2 HDD WD 20EVDS 2TB Sata2 - Clients D:
4_SATA2
5_SATA2 Blu-ray LG BH10LS30 - H:
6_GSATA3 HDD WD 20EZRX 2TB Sata3 - Backup G:
7_GSATA3 SSD Samsung 860 EVO 2TB Sata3 - My E:

Ports 0-5 are supported by Intel Z68 and ports 6-7 by the Marvell controller. For some reason, the drives connected to Marvell GSATA ports 6 and 7 in the BIOS appear as IDE - you can see in the first and second attached photos. This is despite the fact that the AHCI option is rigidly selected in the settings of the Marvell GSATA controller (you can see it in the third attached photo) and, interestingly, the CrystalDiskInfo program indicates that both drives on ports 6 and 7 work as SATA 600, it means SATA3.

Please help me.

[Myopic]

And here is the third photo.

[shadowsports]

Greetings,
The marvell chipset does not support SATA natively.  Its emulated through IDE.

For best performance, do not connect your boot drive to this controller.

Limitations are as follows:

Supports 4 SATA3 devices or 2 SATA6 devices.  If you connect more than 2 SATA6 devices, performance will only be SATA3 for all disks connected to the Marvell chip.

[Myopic]

Its emulated through IDE.

How am I supposed to understand this, since the CrystalDiskInfo program indicates that the disks on the Marvell controller
are running at SATA3 speed?

[shadowsports]

This comes down to implementation.  I can confirm you have the operate mode for the GSATA (Marvel) chip set to AHCI which is correct. 

Marvell
88SE9172

The Marvell® 88SE917X and 88SE9182 host controllers are ideal solutions for small
embedded systems needing SATA connectivity or systems with special temperature or
power requirements. These SATA controllers allow a PCIe-based host system to control up
to two 6Gb/s SATA devices via direct connection. Built-in support for SATA port
multipliers with FIS based switching ensures system scalability with maximum performance.

Older systems:



South bridge, storage controller and MCH is now incorporated in the Z68 northbridge.

Your Z68 board:




The 88SE9172 is PICe 2.0 and only has 1 PCI lane, so if you connect 2 SATA6 disks they will only operate at SATA3 speeds because they are sharing 1 lane.

These chips are connected to the Z68 and in the BIOS are emulated as IDE.  This is how support was implemented in this case.   

[Myopic]

Thank you.

Do I understand correctly that the communication speed on the 6_GSATA3 and 7_GSATA3 ports emulated in IDE mode is similar to the speed on the 0_SATA3 and 1_SATA3 ports, which work in AHCI mode?

[Myopic]

Using CrystalDiskMark, I tested the read and write speeds of two SSDs:
1) C: System, on port 0_SATA3 on Intel Z68 controller in AHCI mode,
2) E: Mine, on port 7_GSATA3 on Marvell controller in IDE emulation mode.

These tests show that the IDE emulation mode on the Marvell controller has significantly reduced read and write speeds.