Is my Marvell controller capping my Read / Write speeds?

[Teenyman45]

I just got a pair of C300 256GB drives and decided to put them in a SATA III RAID 0 array. One of the reasons why I bought a Rampage III Formula MB last year was that the, "newer" for the time, Marvell 9128 chip allowed for RAID on SATA III versus the 9125 chip on many older X58 boards which does not.

The Marvell chip allows for SATA III by cannibalizing a single PCIe lane (which of course means 4-5Gb/ps rather than the full 6Gb/ps in Sandy Bridge) on the X58 platform. It creates a RAID array by using some custom program to merge the two drives into a "virtual array." While in this configuration, my SSDs show up in the bios a single ide hard drive which was labeled as a SSD virtual array.

Windows 7 could finally install to this "drive" and the install went significantly faster than on a 7200 rpm platter drive. I then threw about 150 GB worth of data onto the SSDs to partially test their capacity.

Hooray for me updating some drivers and actually setting it to RAID in my Bios. Write / Read is now at 378 / 243. A little on the slow side, but not too bad for having 170GB worth of data on them, or is it really much slower than it should be?

 

[Old Hippie]

Write / Read is now at 378 / 243.

I don't know what test you're using but it looks to me like you have something wayyyy wrong.

Go install AS-SSD so we can see what's going on.

I'm running 2 Crucial 256GB C300s in RAID0 on an Intel ICH10 chipset and your scores should be better than mine if that Marvell chip was any good.