Looking for a 6G SATA card

[wesweber]

Hello,
My MB is a ASUS Sabertooth x58 with 2 Marvell 6G SATA ports. I have a Muskin 240GB SSD and a WD 1TB drive connected to them, both drives are 6Gb capable.
After some research I found the Marvell chip is sorely lacking in capability which I confirmed with my own benchmarking. I'm getting around 230+Mb/s.
I'm looking for a good add-on card that will provide up to 6Gb/s data rates. Buget is under $200 and it would be nice if the internal connectors were SATA connectors.

Anyone have any recomendations?

 

[WyomingKnott]

I don't, but I can tell you one thing to watch out for. There are a lot of cards that have SATA III compliant controllers but only a single PCI-E lane to the bus. You need more lanes, and a motherboard slot that supports more than one lane. Otherwise, your nice speedy interface gets choked.

You could post benchmarks and people with the experience could tell you if your rates are reasonable. (sounds like a bank ad)

 

[FireWire2]

yes, there is a NEW Marvell SATA (6Gb) is coming...
It has 2x lanes of PCIe2 (10Gb/s) same speed as Thunbder-bold

 

[WyomingKnott]

FireWire2

I have seen quite a few posts about Marvell mobo chips not getting full SATA III speed. Like, for example, the original one here. Is there an indication that Marvell will have addressed this issue?

Hello again. Long time, no see.

 

[FireWire2]

WyomingKnott
Thank you ! a bit busy that is a good thing.
Yes the NEW Marvell chipset 88SE9235
For more detail you can go here:
http://www.marvell.com/storage/system-solutions/assets/Marvell-88SE92xx-002-product-brief.pdf

Hopefully they do it right this time

 

[WyomingKnott]

Four 6Gb/s controllers on 2 5Gb/s lanes? Unless I misplaced a capital B, it's far from ideal.

 

[FireWire2]

You are absolutely right about that!...
But at least you can use up 2x ports with SSD drives and see the real improvement

 

[wesweber]

After reading their spec sheet it looks like another bottleneck device. 6Gb/s on one side and 5Gb/s on the pcie side.
How about products based on Intel chips?

 

[WyomingKnott]

Oh, this is going to be a bad day. I just typed a whole reply and lost it.

Wes, you didn't have to read the spec sheet to see that, it's what FireWire2 and I were discussing. You are reading what we post, yes? (wink)

If you only attach one disk to that card, the theoretical limit is not an issue. In practice, as you found with the chip on your mobo, a port being SATA III doesn't guarantee that it can operate at full speed. The same thing may be true of PCI-E implementations.

If you are going to run more drives, and want full theoretical bandwidth, you will simply need a card with more lanes. There is a legendary one that can't be found; it's mentioned here http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/storage/54861-sata-iii-controller-card.html , but it seems to be no longer available.

If you have a friend with a mobo that has native SATA III on the southbridge, it would be interesting to bench the drive on that board. Unlikely as it is, that might be the drive's limit. And even if the drive has much more headroom, you will know what your target is with the new controller.

We will be very interested in whatever benchmarks you do.