SATA 3 Dumb Controller For 850 Pro

yuljk

yuljk

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Hi guys - I'm looking for a SATA 3 controller (doesn't need to do RAID) for a couple of 850 Pro's which I'll be using as an ESXi 6.5 datastore.

My board only has SATA 2 ports onboard, hence the requirement for a card. I'll be using a PCIe x16 2.0 slot, and need something to get the best performance for these drives.

I had a look at buying a cheap M1015 and flashing it to IT mode - however I've heard people have had a lot of issues with LSI cards and Samsung 840/850.

I came across a Syba SI-PEX40063 which seems to provide two PCIe lanes. Any other suggestions much appreciated!

Cheers
 
Pretty limited with sata 2 something like 290mb/s I don't know try raid what I did a lot. Either that or finding the drives with the lowest latencies.
 
I won't be using the onboard SATA 2 ports. Please read my post...
 
Then you're stuck paying out-the-ass for a real RAID controller, because dumb SATA 3 controllers are slower than Intel's SATA2 controller. They're designed to max-out a hard drive at up to 600MB/s, and not SSDs.

SSDs do a lot of parallel operations, while hard drives just do one thing over-and-over. So having faster operations is more important than maxing-out the peak transfer rate.

Depending on the load, you will probably not notice the difference between Intel SATA2 and Intel SATA3. Most SSDs already feel plenty fast on 2. BUT you likely will notice the slower performance of a MArvel chipset versus Intel SATA2
 
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yuljk said:
Hi guys - I'm looking for a SATA 3 controller (doesn't need to do RAID) for a couple of 850 Pro's which I'll be using as an ESXi 6.5 datastore.

My board only has SATA 2 ports onboard, hence the requirement for a card. I'll be using a PCIe x16 2.0 slot, and need something to get the best performance for these drives.

I had a look at buying a cheap M1015 and flashing it to IT mode - however I've heard people have had a lot of issues with LSI cards and Samsung 840/850.

I came across a Syba SI-PEX40063 which seems to provide two PCIe lanes. Any other suggestions much appreciated!

Cheers
Click to expand...
That Syba is a Marvell 88SE9235 which I have had good experience with. Its obviously not going to be like an Intel ICH but mine hits 400-500MB/sec. That is with the latest firmware flashed. Honestly unless you are doing hardware raid its suitable.
 
Thanks PilotronX - Yeah, I saw a few reviews that mentioned similar speeds reported as that particular card uses two PCIe lanes as apposed to one (which I believe the previous card in the series from Syba manages)

I'm not fussed atall about hardware RAID. I'm simply passing these through as local VMFS storage for ESXi - There's a custom VIB workaround I can use as barely any of these Marvell chipset cards work out of the box.

DefaultUser - I'd potentially go with a fairly mid-range RAID 6 card, however from my research I've seen nothing but issues with LSI RAID cards and Samsung 850's. Otherwise the M1015 would have been my first choice. If anyone has had any luck with LSI cards and getting decent enough performance I'd appreciate any suggestions.
 
I found that the SATA2 controllers on my "old" X58 board were just as fast as the Marvell based SATA3 controllers on the add-on chip onboard (with an 850 Evo). You might be surprised at the lack of difference between the onboard SATA2 and the Marvell 88SE9235. Some things will be faster and some slower.
 
Cheers for the replies guys - very much appreciated. I think I'll grab the Syba SI-PEX40062 as it's based on the Marvell 88SE9235 chipset which provides two PCIe lanes. They're only 20 quid, so if I don't see any noticeable performance benefit I'll switch back over to the onboard SATA 2 ports.
 
The SATA6 will win at "sequential" benchmarks, and the SATA3 will win at everything that actually stresses an SSD (4kb random, small file copy).
 
Dell PERCs are exclusively LSI/Avago with Dell's firmware molestation and even with said firmware while deeming 850 Evos as "non certified", they scream in RAID-10 and even 5. I would be surprised if you see any problem at all with LSI controllers.
 
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