Marvell 9128 Controller

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Dr. Herbert West

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Nov 27, 2010
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I am planning on getting an Asus Sabertooth motherboard it has the Marvell 9128 Controller. Now I was planning on getting a C300 128GB but, I have read that the controller is not supporting TRIM at all, and people are recommending running this drive in SATA II. Is this true? Should I look at getting a different SSD? My Sata II will be handling three Raptors in Raid 0 and two DVD Burners. Would this lower the performance of the SSD at all?
 
I'm assuming you talking about the P55 or x58 Sabertooth MB...

If you use the Microsoft AHCI generic driver on the Marvel controller, you will have trim support and the overall performance is equal to the craptastic Marvell drivers. That being said, while it will benchmark better for certain things like large sequential transfers, the C300 will generally perform better at doing the things the computer is usually doing much better (like lots of random small reads/writes) on the Intel SATA2 controller, just because it's a better controller than the Marvell one.

Now if you are runnning RAID0 on the Intel SATA2 ports at the same time, the C300 "may" do better on the Marvell controller side regardless since it wont be fighting for controller bandwidth with the RAID. You need to bench it to know for sure though.
 
Thanks for that info, from all the things I read last night it, many people run the C300 on the intel port which does support Trim, does anyone know if I would be able to use Intel's SSD Toolbox on the C300 while using their sata controller? Thanks for the input on the raid0, maybe ill look at getting a pcie raid controller. Now I am sure wondering if it's worth getting the C300 or if I should just go with a Intel 120GB everyone here seems to love their Intel SSD's.

Edit:
I am talking about the x58 Sabertooth
 
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does anyone know if I would be able to use Intel's SSD Toolbox on the C300 while using their sata controller?
Click to expand...
You can't use it for any functions but it will give you the SSDs specs. Pretty much worthless unless you have Intel drives.

I have an Asus P6T with a Crucial C300 256GB SSD and just purchased an LSI SAS 9240-4i expansion card. Check out the difference with and without the card....

Intel ICH10R controller.....

ich10.png



LSI card......

asssdbenchatac300ctfdda.png


I doubt the Marvell controller would give that type of results but I'd like to see some tests.

Do yourself a favor and wait for the new Crucial C400 series.

Put a coupla 128GB C400s on an LSI card and watch them sing to ya. :)
 
The LSI's are very decent controllers. The Marvell's built into motherboards will not show anywhere near that performance.
 
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