Putting SDD on a ICH10R vs Marvell 9128 - Which is best??

Eftegarie

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I have an interesting question for all us owners of Intel X58 chipset architecture (for example my motherboard X58A-UD7 rev2) who have to choose between putting their SSD on either:
- Intel ICH10R Sata2 with TRIM but bottlenecked at ± 270mb/s
- Marvell 9128 Sata3 without TRIM no bottlenechs untill ±570 mb/s

Two scenarios pop up into mind when on tight budget (not in the mood for any raid controllers)

SCENARIO A ("stuffing of the goose")
4 x moderately fast SSDs (270+ mb/s read & 270mb/s write), together as raid0
using the Intel ICH10R sata2 channels, together summing up around 1000 mb/s read/write speeds
cloning of the entire virtual disc once a month


SCENARIO B
("one really fast pigeon")
1 x blazing fast SSD (550+ mb/s read & 500+ mb/s write) as a single SSD of 256 GB.
using the Marvell sata3 channel, providing around 500mb/s read/write speeds

Which of these two do you prefer and why?
 
Keep in mind if you go with option one you have four times the failure rate over a single drive.
 
Well, RAID0 isn't technically four times the failure rate since you write 2x less on each SSD. You are, however exposed to the RAID array failure (I'm pretty sure you know about it :).

I had the same dilemma a couple of months ago and read about Marvell controller's problems and general slowness (not sure if this is still relevant).

I finally bought two Crucial m4 and put them in RAID0. I am one happy user right now :)
 
The ICH10R have a bandwidth cap of just under 700MB/s (610-680ish, varies from review to review). So the first option will not be able to achieve your goal of 1000MB/s. On the other hand the Marvell 9128 bottlenecks at around 400MB/s.
Personally I'd go with 2x SSDs in raid 0 on the Intel controller. You'll get similar performance to one sata-III SSD but halves the chances that a hardware failure kills your raid compared to running 4 drives.
 
Folks what a great insights you are giving here! Thanks! It is already changing my descisions... @Pandur, if wht you are saying is true (I have never heard of that 700mb/s cap??!! where have you found this? :cool: very curious!) this makes 4 drives useless indeed... 2 would then be better indeed...

Curiously awaiting your reference to the 700mb/cap...
 
I will be making full backup clones often so please forget about the raid problems X1 vs X2 vs X3 vs X4 drives. performance is what I need and of course affordability :) i use now 4 drives in RAID0 for over two years without any hitch, backuping entire disc regularly. cooling HDD's is the key.
 
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In Max PC there is a good question about life of SSD, its says most peeps should not hit the lifetime write barrier, but to in any case understand that the failure (should) still allow reads, so data is safe.

I thought the Intel SATA was considered the fastest compared to Marvell.

I have M4's and like them.
 
The Marvell controller is inferior to the ICH10 and shouldn't even be under consideration.

As Pandur said the Intel's capacity is @ 650 mb/s.
 
I've seen several reviews that's tested raid on different chipsets and they all show what I said above. A quick search at google finds many of them, but lets stick to the [H] version.
 
Raid 0 is pointless on ssd's if you don't have a use for the sequential speeds. You lose out on trim and you get no gains on random read/writes (4k speeds). The whole ordeal will leave you with a bitter feeling, you end up risking your data if one fails as well. The whole ordeal is a waste. Even if you max your sequential speeds, which is limited most of the time by the chipset, you end up almost never using that capability to its max anyway. On an HDD setup raid 0 is really nice for the speeds but ssd's are incredibly faster at everything compared to HDD's

I would go with one 256 on your Intel chipset so you get trim, you won't notice the difference unless you benchmark or again use some software that legitimately uses that speed, and in most cases software that uses that usually doesn't want to be faulted by a raid 0 array anyway. Just my 2 cents. I know I didn't pick one of your options because... neither of them really work well imo.
 
I am starting to feel that pewter77 might be right, afterall..... thanks folks for your insightfull suggestions! PS I do edit heavy big files often ( +/- 50mb~100 MB indesign files, huge raw files where sequential read / write speeds ARE a factor that I cannot completely forget... for photo editing etc... what would you pick in this case still the single drive option or perhaps raid0 and backup often?)
 
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