• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Are Marvell SATA controllers trash?

Megalith

Megalith

24-bit/48kHz
Joined
Aug 20, 2006
Messages
13,000
I was transferring a large amount of data to a drive connected to a Marvell controller, and it kept dropping. I'm going to assume it had to do with overload, since it would only happen well into a long file transfer. Initially I was concerned that it was a bad drive, but I later realized it couldn't be since all drives associated with that controller would simultaneously disconnect—it had to be controller related.

I have never experienced anything like this with an Intel controller and have found many reports of Marvell controllers being unreliable. Should I assume that Marvell's stuff is crap? What's your experience?
 
Marvell has been total shit to me. I've had the same or similar experience myself on a few motherboards. Trying to do a long backup took forever to get going (1-2 MBps) and would eventually fail when the drives were disconnected, or they would disconnect themselves without intervention. I was first concerned it was the drive when chkdsk would take 20 hours and then fail, but moving the drives to the Intel or LSI controller instantly brought them back with only a few bad sectors (but I can't say the Marvell caused them, they are older drives).
 
  • Marvel management software (BIOS or Windows) is universally trash.
  • IME onboard Marvells have been universally slower than onboard Intel
  • But onboard Marvells have been stable, including long transfers (using Windows default AHCI drivers, no fakeRAID or other nonsense)
  • Exception was when hotplugging drives -- not stable.
  • Have had issues using PCI/e cards with Marvell chipsets
Overall, I think Marvell is decent enough if you really need extra SATA ports on the cheap. It's definitely better than the absolute crap that came before like JMicron, Silicon Image, etc.
 
I've been using a Marvell based PCI/e SATA RAID controller for years on a low end Dell server
with no issues. Two 500GB Samsung drives in RAID-1 mirror.

No errors or drive disconnects on large transfers over several hours.
 
While they do support AHCI many seems to have interesting quirks or being just plain buggy. You might want to look into a firmware upgrade if there's one available. I would however suggest that you go for ASMedia ASM106*-controllers instead.
 
but I later realized it couldn't be since all drives associated with that controller would simultaneously disconnect—it had to be controller related.
Click to expand...

A bad drive can trigger that if the driver is not properly designed to handle the drive disconnect.
 
Megalith said:
I was transferring a large amount of data to a drive connected to a Marvell controller, and it kept dropping. I'm going to assume it had to do with overload, since it would only happen well into a long file transfer. Initially I was concerned that it was a bad drive, but I later realized it couldn't be since all drives associated with that controller would simultaneously disconnect—it had to be controller related.

I have never experienced anything like this with an Intel controller and have found many reports of Marvell controllers being unreliable. Should I assume that Marvell's stuff is crap? What's your experience?
Click to expand...

Just my experience, of the few marvel controllers I've had card or onboard they've been solid for the most part. Every issue I've had that I thought was the controller ended up being something else in the end.

The past few times I've had drives falling out, majority of the time its been power related for me. Many times something as stupid as trying a different power connector caused the drives to stop falling out.
 
The only PCIe SATA controller card I've found that works reliably with optical drives has a Marvel controller on it, so no, I wouldn't say they're all trash.
 
The benchmarks: Intel, LSI (SAS)
|
|
[Large Gap]
|
|
Marvell
|
Jmicron
ASmedia, Realtek(?) and all the other bottom gutter, no-name, trash firmware, pennies-per-chip lets-add-more-bullet-point-features-to-this-board chip guys.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top