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Intel vs Marvell for cheap raid

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ep0x73

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Picked up a pair of 3TB HGST NAS drives to put in a raid1 but can't decide which route to go.

Benched both Intel and marvell and they are the same, Marvell is a nip faster.

What I don't like is the fact Marvell creates a virtual disk which cannot be seen by crystaldiskinfo or HDtune so you have zero clue what their temp is or SMART.

With Intel crystal can see each disk but HDtune cannot, it just sees the raid and can't give you temp but does give smart.

Marvell is a hardware chip, Intel is firmware. Both have their own ROM and additional software. I like Intel's RST much better then MRU which means loading up your browser to "login" which is a pain in the ass.

How nice it would be if Intel boards included Intel hardware raid controllers, Areca or somebody so you can see temperature and smart through programs.

I also noticed fooling around to break the raid1 with Marvell hoses all content whereas with Intel you can delete the raid and not lose your information.

I've done it on computers where the OS was in raid with no ill effects.

Bottom line both are alright but not great.

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Since this Marvell controller is hardware raid embedded I'd assume it would be best to use drives that have TLER [RE] then drives without

Anybody using their Marvell controller on board with raid?
 
ep0x73 said:
Since this Marvell controller is hardware raid embedded I'd assume it would be best to use drives that have TLER [RE] then drives without

Anybody using their Marvell controller on board with raid?
Click to expand...

The Marvell controller is not a hardware RAID controller. It's effectively the same thing as the Intel RAID controller on every Z87 motherboard out there.. Neither have a dedicated XOR engine or RAM for parity calculations.
 
Marvell begs to differ.

The Marvell 88SE9220 and 88SE9230 SATA host controllers are ideal solutions for RAID on motherboard (ROMB) and cost-effective host bus adapters (HBAs). It allows PCIe-based host systems to control up to four SATA 6Gb/s HDDs or SSDs. An embedded ARM-based CPU makes this product a pure hardware RAID controller and enables in-box driver support without additional driver installation.

Parity is only for raid 5, that is not included, only 0,1 and 10 for that reason.
 
ep0x73 said:
Marvell begs to differ.

The Marvell 88SE9220 and 88SE9230 SATA host controllers are ideal solutions for RAID on motherboard (ROMB) and cost-effective host bus adapters (HBAs). It allows PCIe-based host systems to control up to four SATA 6Gb/s HDDs or SSDs. An embedded ARM-based CPU makes this product a pure hardware RAID controller and enables in-box driver support without additional driver installation.

Parity is only for raid 5, that is not included, only 0,1 and 10 for that reason.
Click to expand...

Marvel is full of crap then:
http://www.servethehome.com/anatomy-hardware-raid-controller/
http://www.servethehome.com/difference-hardware-raid-hbas-software-raid/
 
They have kinda been doing this for many years, I am sure they can't call it a raid controller if it is not, liabilities.

It's a ARM based raid chip, Intel is firmware/software raid.

MSU is software only to monitor the array, everything can be done on the ROM.

http://www.marvell.com/storage/system-solutions/assets/Marvell-88SE92xx-Product-Brief.pdf

Feel free to call one of their reps and call them liars then for falsifying their products.

Maybe you don't need a $300 ARECA card with 512 ram and a P4 processor just to do simple raid 0 and 1.
 
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I do use intel raid 5 which works fine with disk cache flushing off (I only write permanent-ish things to it, it's basically an archive 90% read drive), but I have a rocket 640l which was pretty shit at doing any form of raid. It's not a rocketRaid card, but it has a Marvell 88SE9230 chip in it which can do JBOD, raid 0, and raid 1. I ended up just using it as a JBOD card and using storage spaces within windows, it seems to work better. I just dislike the lack of control I have over where things actually are on the disks.
 
88SE9230 is their newest chipset and it does not include 5.

I put two HGST NAS drives in raid 0 and it had great speeds, SSD read speeds but it was
just to experiment.

Highpoint does not have a very good track record, their cards all seem full of issues.

Without a dedicated CPU/ram raid 5 through Intel firmware raid has been shown to be slow, high CPU load and
full of issues.
 
ep0x73 said:
88SE9230 is their newest chipset and it does not include 5.

I put two HGST NAS drives in raid 0 and it had great speeds, SSD read speeds but it was
just to experiment.

Highpoint does not have a very good track record, their cards all seem full of issues.

Without a dedicated CPU/ram raid 5 through Intel firmware raid has been shown to be slow, high CPU load and
full of issues.
Click to expand...

I'll agree with the last one, but I have no CPU usage when writing to my raid 5 array and there is a bit of memory usage, but I'm willing to deal with the occasional usage of my ram instead of paying 200 bucks for a low end hardware raid card.

Set the intel software to disable the write cache flush and put it in write back mode and the speeds are great. It's an archival raid format, not a speed-oriented one.

The one issue I've had with it, and it really seems different on different motherboards, is that bios upgrades really can wreck them. But that's what backups are for.

In the future, if I really do need more storage, I plan on trying out some sort of external USB3 based solution as I'm out of pci-express slots that can be reached. I still have room for one more 4TB drive though.
 
Side question on the Marvell 88SE9230. I have one of the Addonics Quad mSATA PCI-E boards with that controller. Does anyone know if the Marvell controller passes TRIM commands to the mSATA drives when it's set up as RAID 0, 1 or 10?
 
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