Battle of the SATA 3.0 Controllers

[Rob Williams]

With newer SSDs now coming well within 10% of maxing out a SATA 3.0 port, it's important to make sure that your motherboard is properly equipped to handle such drives if planning to buy one. In our testing, while AMD's and Intel's solutions offered superb performance, Marvell's leaved a bit (or a lot) to be desired.

Read through our look at the performance of AMD's, Intel's and Marvell's SATA 3.0 controllers and then discuss it here!

 

[Rob Williams]

Whoops, I did say that I'd put PCMark 7 break-down scores here, didn't I?

AMD A75
HDD Suite: 5283
Windows Defender: 5.51 MB/s
Importing Pictures: 28.05 MB/s
Video Editing: 23.17 MB/s
Windows Media Center: 8.24 MB/s
Adding Music: 1.40 MB/s
Starting Applications: 54.92 MB/s
Gaming: 16.72 MB/s

Intel Z68
HDD Suite: 5390
Windows Defender: 5.63 MB/s
Importing Pictures: 30.32 MB/s
Video Editing: 23.50 MB/s
Windows Media Center: 8.28 MB/s
Adding Music: 1.41 MB/s
Starting Applications: 54.28 MB/s
Gaming: 17.17 MB/s

Marvell 9172
HDD Suite: 5125
Windows Defender: 5.60 MB/s
Importing Pictures: 25.12 MB/s
Video Editing: 22.94 MB/s
Windows Media Center: 8.12 MB/s
Adding Music: 1.41 MB/s
Starting Applications: 49.06 MB/s
Gaming: 16.92 MB/s

 

[Psi*]

I hope that I am not going to come across as being "thick", but do X58 m/bs have an inferior Marvell PCIe interface? If so and sort of related, this would also indicate that any PCIe adapter card on a PCIe 2.0 m/b would also be similarily throtteled.

 

[Kougar]

Sigh... every time I can get happy with my old rig, something like this comes along and gives me a tangible reason for why I should upgrade. Rob, it's all your fault!

I hope that I am not going to come across as being "thick", but do X58 m/bs have an inferior Marvell PCIe interface? If so and sort of related, this would also indicate that any PCIe adapter card on a PCIe 2.0 m/b would also be similarily throtteled.

Not at all, you don't learn if ya don't ask!

Unfortunately for us both, almost every X58 board that offers SATA 6Gbps does indeed use these inferior Marvell controllers. Remember that PCIe is measured in lanes, so any adapter card that was 1x would be bottlenecked, but most SATA 6Gbps cards available should be 4x wide.

 

[Rob Williams]

I can't believe I forgot to give Robert (Kougar) a shout-out in the article; apologies man! Robert endured a barrage of questions from me over the course of literally eight hours or so sometime last week in order to make sure we had things straight for this article, so kudos for that

Unfortunately for us both, almost every X58 board that offers SATA 6Gbps does indeed use these inferior Marvell controllers. Remember that PCIe is measured in lanes, so any adapter card that was 1x would be bottlenecked, but most SATA 6Gbps cards available should be 4x wide.

It's unfortunate, that's for sure. One motherboard vendor mentioned to me that some of their boards had begun using ASMedia chipsets, so once I get a board that has one of those, I might re-run all of the testing, while also adding SATA 2.0 results into the mix, and some real-world tests.

 

[marfig]

Thanks both (Rob and Kougar) for this review.

Unfortunately, Marvell's is precisely the SATA 3.0 controller on my board. What's more disheartening, they don't offer software updates. My driver 1.0.0.10.42 is listed as current on Asus downloads and yet the date is from July 2010.

The performance differences are utterly dismaying. Not to imply it wouldn't still be great to have SATA 3 devices on my computer. But those numbers are like earlier version of Intel SATA 3 controllers.

 

[Rob Williams]

Unfortunately, Marvell's is precisely the SATA 3.0 controller on my board. What's more disheartening, they don't offer software updates. My driver 1.0.0.10.42 is listed as current on Asus downloads and yet the date is from July 2010.

No kidding! I Googled for these different chipsets and have surmised that Marvell itself doesn't even list them on its website. To update a driver you have to take a chance with newer versions that float around the Web - but there's no telling if it's going to work ideally for you or not, since it wasn't built for YOUR motherboard (where vendor-specific tweaks might have made it into the driver).

 

[Psi*]

Does such a card exist?

 

[Kougar]

Does such a card exist?

Look for any PCI Express 4x cards. They will usually be found on 4+ SATA port cards...

Newegg seems to have a literal MOUNTAIN of 1x slot cards, incredible. They split them into Add On cards and RAID controllers, which makes it even worse...

Most of the suitable cards on Newegg are RAID cards. You can use them as just a controller card though, but they cost more. Such as this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115077

Or for the extreme situations, try Intel http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816117214

 

[Psi*]

thanks Kougar. I had plowed thru Newegg before posting that question & it made no sense what so ever.

 

[Rob Williams]

Or for the extreme situations, try Intel http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816117214

Is there nothing cheaper than that, like a poor-man's 2 port card or something? I searched around but couldn't find much. Newegg's search feature fails at times, and this is one of those times.

I mentioned to someone the other day that it's too bad Intel doesn't make its own controller cards, but lo and behold, it does. Still, no one will want to pay even $100 for a card that fixes a SATA 6Gb/s problem.

 

[Psi*]

The right adapter card looks like it will be a serious investment.

Visiting HighPoint Technologies shows they are using the Marvell 88SE9128 ... is that what should be avoided??? It also appears that some of their controllers require a server board or one that can make room for the controller board's bios ... ASUS desktop boards might not be compatible in other words.

 

[Kougar]

The right adapter card looks like it will be a serious investment.

Visiting HighPoint Technologies shows they are using the Marvell 88SE9128 ... is that what should be avoided??? It also appears that some of their controllers require a server board or one that can make room for the controller board's bios ... ASUS desktop boards might not be compatible in other words.

Psi... it did not even occur to me to make sure they didn't use Marvell controllers, but you are indeed correct. Nice find That Highpoint RocketRAID card uses a Marvell controller that is circa-2009, meaning it actually predates the variants of the Marvell controller utilized on X58 and P67 motherboards... So I guess my first link is a dud after all! I suggest avoiding it like the plague.

I am no longer sure there IS an affordable solution for full SATA 6Gbps performance on an add-in card. Quality cards that meet all the requirements only seem to go as low as ~$300... Anything cheaper either isn't SATA 6Gbps compliant, or is PCIe 1x. Here's Intel's list of SATA/SAS/RAID controller cards.

Okay, I shall correct myself again. LSI appears to utilize a non-Marvell controller and does offer this controller card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118114 As long as it allows users to select AHCI mode in the card's BIOS, then it should be a solid card. Without having personally used one I'm not 100% certain if it will allow this. How it handles pass-through commmands is important, because in RAID mode features like TRIM will be lost, so it is important to use AHCI with such a card if not using RAID.

 

[Rob Williams]

Okay, I shall correct myself again. LSI appears to utilize a non-Marvell controller and does offer this controller card: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816118114 As long as it allows users to select AHCI mode in the card's BIOS, then it should be a solid card. Without having personally used one I'm not 100% certain if it will allow this. How it handles pass-through commmands is important, because in RAID mode features like TRIM will be lost, so it is important to use AHCI with such a card if not using RAID.

$150 for a ONE port card? That is ridiculous! At that point one might as well just suck up the loss of performance on their Marvell chip and just prepare for their next full PC upgrade.

 

[Psi*]

One would really have to have a need for speed to make this jump. But if one did, I noticed this at Adaptec. A hybrid SSD + HDD RAID controller, 8 lane PCIe Gen2, 6Gb/s per port ... Newegg. And, coming with cables is apparently a bonus == $.

So if one were going to make the jump, this one gets my vote. My issue is that I would need 3 ... sooo I don't think so ... business is that good, so far.

 

[Kougar]

$150 for a ONE port card? That is ridiculous! At that point one might as well just suck up the loss of performance on their Marvell chip and just prepare for their next full PC upgrade.

That's a SAS port, you can attach four SATA drives to one, although you need a SAS cable. This card supports four SATA 6Gbps drives.

 

[Submux]

Within 10%?

With newer SSDs now coming well within 10% of maxing out a SATA 3.0 port

I'm no genius or anything, so I'll only take a stab here.

Serial ATA 3.0 has a transfer speed of 6.0Gbp/s.
8b/10b encoding adjusts the maximum byte transfer rate to 600MB/s
FIS overhead can be as much as 1/17th of the bandwidth, but in reality should average 5%. Therefore consuming 30Mb/s bandwidth.

So far, we're at a maximum theoretical transfer rate with ABSOLUTELY NO ERRORS or other protocol overhead of 570MB/s. If we consider that there will be at least minimum queing delay time for NCQ-II operations allowing bigger bursts to occur (and giving us a higher sustained rate), the remaining 15MB/s quickly disappears.

I'd say we're not withing 10% of maxing out SATA-3.0 but without some magic and voodoo are likely within fractions of a percent. There's always ways to squeeze a little more out. But it's not looking good.

The follow up to this is to implement single devices with "built-in RAID" so that you can partition the drive into halves and link multiple SATA-3 channels to the same device and run a stripe. This should allow maybe up to 900MB/S.

 

[Siv]

Rob, Kougar,

I am a noob to this sort of chipset stuff and am thinking of building a new PC to replace my aging Dell work PC. Is there any chance you might compile a list of recommended motherboards for Intel processors that people like me should look at to avoid this marvel performance issue.

Don't worry about other factors as I can usually pick a mobo that suits my other hardware requirements, just ones that don't have the dreaded Marvell chips.

My main reason for building a new PC was to a) get a PC that uses SATA III, b) USB3 and (c to have a SATA III capable SSD to go with it. Probably an i5 or i7 processor with pretty quick clock speed but doesn't need to be "gaming" spec as I just need it for development and picture and video editing.

Reading this review via slashdot has probably saved me blundering into a Marvel chipset board and wondering why my new SSD wasn't as brilliant as would have been expected. I am currently running an SATAII SSD (Corsair 128GB) on my Dell and it really improved performance over the existing WD drive I had in it, but am now looking to get a more up to date drive and want to get even greater performance.

Thanks very much for the heads up, hopefully this will get out on the wider internet and force Marvel and the mobo designers to clean up their act!!

Siv

 

[Psi*]

I just bought from 'egg the 6405 + WD 1 TB HDD to use with the Corsair FORCE 3 I just recieved. I am thinking that this would be a bit of a hedge on the future for one of my machines (1 of 4) as I like to milk as many years as possible from each box.

I very briefly scoped out faster local network possiblilities beyond 1000 MB/s ethernet like 4.24 Gbps fiber channel ... $WOW$ is that a pipe dream!

Otherwise I am looking forward to more affordable X79 boards + better on board SATA III.

 

[Kougar]

Rob, Kougar,

I am a noob to this sort of chipset stuff and am thinking of building a new PC to replace my aging Dell work PC. Is there any chance you might compile a list of recommended motherboards for Intel processors that people like me should look at to avoid this marvel performance issue.

Howdy Siv! Sorry for a bit of a late reply to your question.

For the moment, the safest thing to do is make sure to stick to a motherboard that uses Intel's own SATA 6Gbps controller. These deliver the best performance and stability with SATA 6Gbps SSDs. Many P67 and Z68 motherboards come with these, but a quick read through the port listing or the manufacturer's website will confirm it for you.

After having used ASUS's P8P67 as Techgage's SSD test platform I feel the new UEFI BIOS has plenty of polishing left to do, but even so it is still the best matchup for SSDs. Intel and ASUS both utilize UEFI BIOS motherboards, but we should see more pickup with the next generation of chipsets.