SATA 6 controllers

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eddieck

Gawd
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Dec 13, 2009
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So SATA 6 has been out and available for several months now. At the moment the only controllers are from Marvell and are PCIe x1 (for a 600 MiB/s bus). When are we going to start seeing some reasonable controller products that aren't bottlenecked by their PCIe bus? (RAID obviously not being a requirement, just a basic SATA 6 controller)
 
When they get integrated into the chipset. AMD 8xx series chipset offers 6 native SATA/600 ports. Intel's newest chipsets offer 2 native SATA/600 and 4 SATA/300. You should be seeing these at beginning of 2011 when sandy bridge platform comes out.

But the performance difference will be small; no SSD out now uses the additional bandwidth effectively (330MB/s reads or so). But newer SSDs might, some of which are expected to launch end this year. So SATA/300 should be good enough i think. Get SATA/600 when it counts. That's not going to be in 2010.
 
There are some sas controllers that do this but they are not cheap.

http://www.provantage.com/lsi-logic-lsi00204~7LSIG0CR.htm


http://www.cdwg.com/shop/products/default.aspx?EDC=1893898

http://www.cdwg.com/shop/products/default.aspx?EDC=1893895

Edit: I better warn that I have not tested any of these yet. Especially with the only drive on the market that can saturate a SATA2 bus.. And my experience with the 1 sas card that I have is that the sas (LSI SAS3080X0R) card may default to a lower speed. I see this with my pci-x lsi sas card. I have 2 x 8 port cards with 10 SATA 1 drives on 2 the 2 cards and 1 SATA2 drive. The sata 2 drive runs at SATA1 speed even though the card says that it could do SATA2. This may just be this card I do not know.
 
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Sucks for having to wait until SB. I was hoping to be able to get a new board with a reasonable SATA 6 implementation soon to make this build last a bit longer (need to upgrade my board for SLI support).
 
eddieck said:
So SATA 6 has been out and available for several months now. At the moment the only controllers are from Marvell and are PCIe x1 (for a 600 MiB/s bus). When are we going to start seeing some reasonable controller products that aren't bottlenecked by their PCIe bus? (RAID obviously not being a requirement, just a basic SATA 6 controller)
Click to expand...

Assume you are using SSD or 10K rpm HDD, otherwise 7200rpm does not improve much. You can use several low cost card SATA3 (6.0Gb) with this PCIe expander

This allows you to have 8 ports SATA6 in PCIe V2.0 x4 slot ( one to one connection)

But if you use PM ware bridge, you can connected up to 40x drives
 
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DATOptic.Support said:
Assume you are using SSD or 10K rpm HDD, otherwise 7200rpm does not improve much. You can use several low cost card SATA3 (6.0Gb) with this PCIe expander

This allows you to have 8 ports SATA6 in PCIe V2.0 x4 slot ( one to one connection)

But if you use PM ware bridge, you can connected up to 40x drives
Click to expand...

I can't say I see where you're going with that .The SATA 6 card you linked me to is still a PCIe x1 card using the Marvell controller. It's still bottlenecked by the PCIe bus.

I'm most likely going to end up ordering a non-SATA6 board (upgrading my P6T SE because I need SLI support) and I'll add a SATA6 controller card when I need it and when controllers are reasonable. My reason for wanting it now is for simple futureproofing - I do not have any devices that need it currently.
 
All of the PCIe SATA 6 are PCIe V2.0, It means they are 5Gbps bus there should be very minimal limitation on the bus, if any
 
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