3rd generation sata drive on a sata 2 controller

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Riddleofsteel

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I just ordered a Crucial M4, the one that was having a slight sale at Newegg. But I didn't think about the fact that I have an X58 board with the Marvell 6g controller. Should I run this nice drive off a sata 2 controller? Thanks for any help.
 
Did I state something incorrectly? I just know that the X58 only has the Marvell controller available for the newest revision of sata technology. Am I shooting myself in the foot by running a fast ssd on an older controller?
 
I guess you could always benchmark it on both controllers, see which one does better overall. Maximum read/write will be limited to 270 MB/s on the SATA II controller no matter what.
 
Riddleofsteel said:
I just ordered a Crucial M4, the one that was having a slight sale at Newegg. But I didn't think about the fact that I have an X58 board with the Marvell 6g controller. Should I run this nice drive off a sata 2 controller? Thanks for any help.
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You can, but SATA-II might hold it back a bit, but certainly would not hurt anything. SATA-III SSDs can have a good bit of gain on SATA-III.
 
I thought the Marvell 6G controller was the same speed as the Intel 3G controller? Even though it's 6Gbps it's not very good.
 
Ah yes, Marvell controllers aren't the best. If you can, try to go with an expansion card that supports SATA-III.
 
Oh dear. I should have held off on buying the ssd, because it will be a while before I can afford a controller. Aren't the good ones at least around 400 dollars?
 
you be fine.
ssd best thing is access time, random read, and those is important, not the read speeds and write speeds, when you got that, more speed isn't noticeable much if any.
you be good with the current motherboard, put it in, enjoy the system.
 
I got the drive today. Going to connect it to my Intel ICH10R controller and let it rip. Do I need to write zeros to it first? And do I need to get special drivers for windows 7 installation?
 
Riddleofsteel said:
I got the drive today. Going to connect it to my Intel ICH10R controller and let it rip. Do I need to write zeros to it first? And do I need to get special drivers for windows 7 installation?
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No and no. Additionally, the ICH10R will out perform the Marvell 9128 most of the time. Even if you connect an SATA 6G device to the ICH10R, it will still out perform the Marvell 9128 controller.
 
The one caveat to that is in RAID mode. There are times when the 9128 can produce better results, but it depends heavily on your stripe size and what stripe size you choose depends on what you are going to use the RAID volume for. The 9128 doesn't support stripe sizes below 32 or 64k depending on the implementation. Intel will allow for virtually any stripe size which gives their controller a serious advantage in some tests. And typically when the Marvell controller does produce better results, it's with regard to reads only. Write performance sometimes achieves parity with Intel, but I've never seen it exceed the performance of Intel's controllers in that area. At least, not that I can recall.
 
I recently did some testing where I work, to answer a similar question - although using Intel 6Gbps SSDs (510-series) among other drives:

http://www.pugetsystems.com/articles.php?id=87

In short, the Marvell 6Gbps controllers are not great... but will probably give you somewhat better performance in reads with 6Gbps-capable SSDs than Intel 3Gbps ports. The last graph on the link above is the one to look at for that comparison. Of course, we also have seen serious failure rates with Marvell controller chips - so if you value reliability more than speed I would stick to the Intel controller instead.
 
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I believe the Intel SSD 510 uses a Marvell 9174 controller rather than their own does it not? If so this might explain the slightly better results on the Marvell 9xxx motherboard controllers. Because with Intel's X25-M G2, (I know, this is a 3G device) the Marvell controller was a lot worse. In testing using the Western Digital WD1002FAEX SATA 6GB/s drives I've found that the Marvell controller is still worse than the SATA 3G controller built into the chipset. I haven't had a chance to do any SATA 6G SSD testing as I don't have any drives that support it.

But given the consistently terrible write performance I've seen out of all onboard Marvell controllers, I'd wager that their own controller is helping them out. Or it could just be that the theoretical maximums of the interface are reached (burst mode) far more often using the Marvell controller and that's picking up the slack.
 
It is definitely possible that the paired Marvell controllers when using an Intel 510 SSD are helping that controller - I may re-run these tests with a different brand of 6Gbps SSD sometime if I have a chance, just to compare.

With 3Gbps drives, though, you are absolutely right - no reason to *ever* put those on a Marvell controller. In fact, even 6Gbps *hard drives* fare as well or better on Intel's 3Gbps ports.

It really is a pity that Marvell controllers are so commonly used to provide additional SATA 6Gbps ports (using the term rather loosely) - but for X58 motherboards in particular there isn't really any other option I guess.
 
WilliamMGeorge said:
With 3Gbps drives, though, you are absolutely right - no reason to *ever* put those on a Marvell controller. In fact, even 6Gbps *hard drives* fare as well or better on Intel's 3Gbps ports.
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I know they do. The Western Digital WD1002FAEX Caviar Black 1TB 64MB drives are a prime example of that. This is what I use in motherboard reviews for testing the drive controllers and it's pretty consistent. The Marvell controllers sometimes gain ground in RAID usage and even then only under very specific circumstances but still end up losing to the Intel integrated controllers most of the time. Even if you are using the 3G ports. It's pretty sad really.
 
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