Bad SATA III controller?

[starcracks]

First off, thank you for your help and patience. I just built my first PC (total noob) and I am excited by the prospects of having a SSD boot drive. Unfortunately, I have been unable to get my drive to act very fast! (Read: 160 Write: 68)

SSD: OCZ Solid 3 Sata III
Motherboard: ASRock 770 Extreme3 (AMD Phemon II, A3 socket)
OS: Windows 7 64 (ACHI mode)

OCZ says this drive can max at 500; I'd be happy with 300 at this point!

Searching around it seems as if the problem may lie in the Marvell SATA III controller. Is this control just utter crap? If this is the case, what motherboard would you recommend where I might be able to get faster read and write times out of my SSD?

 

[inzone]

ASRock 870 Extreme3 R2.0 AM3+ AMD 870 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157272

This one does not have the Marvell chip.

 

[inzone]

ASRock 880G PRO3 AM3+ AMD 880G HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157243

This one as well. What you want to do is , like on Newegg's site when you bring up the Motherboard and select the details tab on the right side select the manufacturers product web site and once there select the specifications tab and see what they have for a storage controller chip.

 

[RetiredChief]

What benchmark did you use/ (explanation follows)

A screen shot using as ssd would be helpfull - It will show what driver you are using, Like "pci BAD" (if that is your problem). It will also show partition alignment and if you have the latest firmware.

OCZ (as Most SF22xx sata III drives) advertize UPTO. with emphases on the upto, 500. BUT this is ONLY if the Benchmark uses data that is readly compressable, Real Life this just is not the case. If you use a benchmark
such as AS SSD the data is already compressed and you will not hit the 500 value. Your numbers do seem low though ( remember the "solid" is NOT a race car in the world of SSDs).

Performance wise every thing else equal:
Intel chipset (using RST version 10.6 ) -> amd chipset -> marvel chipset.
NOTE, I would use a Intel sata 3 (II) port over a Marvel Sata 6 (III) port for a SATA 3 SSD.

 

[starcracks]

ASRock 870 Extreme3 R2.0 AM3+ AMD 870 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157272

This one does not have the Marvell chip.

Thanks, this at least gives me a step in the right direction!

 

[starcracks]

What benchmark did you use/ (explanation follows)

A screen shot using as ssd would be helpfull - It will show what driver you are using, Like "pci BAD" (if that is your problem). It will also show partition alignment and if you have the latest firmware.

OCZ (as Most SF22xx sata III drives) advertize UPTO. with emphases on the upto, 500. BUT this is ONLY if the Benchmark uses data that is readly compressable, Real Life this just is not the case. If you use a benchmark
such as AS SSD the data is already compressed and you will not hit the 500 value. Your numbers do seem low though ( remember the "solid" is NOT a race car in the world of SSDs).

Performance wise every thing else equal:
Intel chipset (using RST version 10.6 ) -> amd chipset -> marvel chipset.
NOTE, I would use a Intel sata 3 (II) port over a Marvel Sata 6 (III) port for a SATA 3 SSD.

Thanks for the reply. The AS SSD screen capture is here (http://imgur.com/7ipHL) The 31k-BAD is apparently a non-issue with OCZ drives and is an error that only AS SSD comes up with. I've seen other people's benchmarks with similar OCZ drives that have the 31k-BAD error and they are getting about 300 MB/s.

(I know SSDs do not have incredible super powers, I should specify that I am new at piecing together my own machine. I've used many other computers with SSDs and I know what sort of speed can be expected.)

I am fairly certain it is a Marvell controller problem if not that maybe there is something obvious in the setup I'm missing. If you know of an AMD compatible motherboard that works well with SSDs, or where I can find more info, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks again, RC.

 

[RetiredChief]

(1) Your firmware indicates 2.11, I think there is a ver 2.13 that was recently released - dought it will help a lot, but would try.
(2) Your driver is the default microsoft ahci driver. Not sure if the marvel driver is any better. need to know which chipset the marvel control is (Need to verify that infact it is on a marvel controller as I did not verify)
(3) Yes your score is low. I have two agility IIIs (next step up) and get in the 400's for an overall score. Mine is on an intel chipset (Z68) and using Intel RST driver 10.6.

(4) Sorry can not recommend a AMD MB, possibly a AMD user can join in and recommend one.

Not really a Intel fanboy when it comes to CPUs as price to performance tends to favor AMD. My primary concern is in terms of the support. AMD is getting a little thin (manpower) and this is showing up in the area of driver support, primarily for SSDs. I have never bought a NVidia GPU for desktops, always ATI and now AMD. My last laptop has a 540M Nvidia GPU. And even here the lack of support for using daul GPUs in a Sandybridge laptop shows up in AMD being behind the eight ball for ability to switch between IGP and dedicated GPU when swithing between 2D and 3D graphics.

I almost hate to say this, but if you are going to buy a new MB and if you could afford it I'd switch to a SB i3 CPU (added cost - $134) and MB and sell your CPU/MB to offset the cost.

 

[starcracks]

Best answer selected by starcracks.

 

[starcracks]

Good evening RetiredChief

Just wanted to give a quick update on my situation. I ended up taking the advice of going to Intel. (this is all bad Karma on my part, since Intel is actually paying for me to get a PhD!) I asked kindly to newegg and they allowed me to return the motherboard and processor for a full refund. I got an i5 and a MSI motherboard. I'm not getting sequential read and write speeds just over 500 MB/s and the computer restarts in less than 10 seconds.

Thanks again for you help on this thread and also your other tutorial threads which were very helpful in setting up the drive in Windows.