MARVELL SATA3 problem

[Dark Mantis]

Hi Rick and welcome to the Gigabyte Forum.
The Marvell 9128 chip has been very much of a letdown, not just to Gigabyte but many other manufacturers who incorporated it into their boards. It has never lived up to it's SATA3 status and cannot run a RAID successfully.  Further more it is not advisable to install SSDs on it becaus eit doesn't support TRIM and that is necessary for the continued health of your drive.  You are much better off using the Intel ICH10R southbridge ports  even though they are only rated as SATA2 they actually normally come out faster in the end.

[bedrock1977]

Thanks DM for the response and the welcome. I was afraid of that and was just cautious as this was my first Gigabyte MB purchase. I've always heard good things about their products but have always bought ASUS in the past and found this board for just under $200 US. For all the features it supposedly had it was a great bargain.

Such a shame.

[Dark Mantis]

It is a shame and trust me you weren't the only one to be caught out. I bought a 256GB SSD and a couple of Western Digital Black SATA3 hard drives to RAID0 on  the Marvell ports before I found it didn't work. The rest of the board is still good though and am very pleased with it. I too used to be an Asus fan until recently and came over to Gigabyte.

[Lsdmeasap]

You should be able to create a RAID on the Marvell ports if you want to test yourself, but speeds are terrible and the controller will drop drives from the array.

But you can create one easily, maybe you just needed to update your BIOS first?   I'd  suggest not using those ports for RAID anyway, you can see my full review of controllers and C300 drives here if you want to get a better idea of how things perform on a Gigabyte board.
http://forums.tweaktown.com/storage-devices-methods/41812-crucial-realssd-c300-128gb-single-vs-raid-w-marvell-ich10r-hpt-rr-640-review.html

[Dark Mantis]

Agreed

[bedrock1977]

You should be able to create a RAID on the Marvell ports if you want to test yourself, but speeds are terrible and the controller will drop drives from the array.

But you can create one easily, maybe you just needed to update your BIOS first?   I'd  suggest not using those ports for RAID anyway, you can see my full review of controllers and C300 drives here if you want to get a better idea of how things perform on a Gigabyte board.
http://forums.tweaktown.com/storage-devices-methods/41812-crucial-realssd-c300-128gb-single-vs-raid-w-marvell-ich10r-hpt-rr-640-review.html

Ahh so I'd need to buy an additional PCI-e controller card... hmm they seem pretty pricey so may need to wait a month since I just spent $300.00 US on these two drives. Great review by the way!

[Lsdmeasap]

Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed the review!

Yes, if you want to RAID the C300 you either need a controller card that can handle them, or use the Intel RAID Controller which works perfectly with them.