| Marvell SATA-6G SSD Performance vs Intel ICH10 | |
| Articles - Featured Guides | |
| Written by Olin Coles | |
| Friday, 04 December 2009 | |
|
Page 8 of 8
SATA-6G vs 3Gb/s Final ThoughtsAs of December 2009, the SATA 6Gb/s interface is still in its infancy. The SATA-II (SATA-3Gb/s) interface has been around since 2005, and after nearly five years of real-world production Intel has enjoyed the marketplace advantage. We've recently tested the first SATA 6Gb/s storage device available, and aside from being slightly more future-proof than its counterparts there were no advantages to the new interface. Conversely, Solid State Drive performance actually suffered at the hands of Marvell's 88SE9123 or 88SE9128 controllers. But it's not really fair to single-out the only existing SATA-6G controller available, is it? Since product marketing controls such a strong influence over consumer spending, it's difficult to forgive a disruptive technology. Although SATA 6Gb/s is merely a speed improvement over the previous generation, it's still enough of a change to fuel marketing hype; and that's exactly what we've seen so far. Making hard drive products that are SATA-6G compliant is about as critical as making a lawnmower more aerodynamic. At the end of the day, HDD technology is nowhere near the SATA-3G limit, and even further off from 6.0 Gb/s. This is why we concentrate on Solid State Drive technology.
Marvell vs ICH10 ConclusionConsumers don't like to trouble themselves with the technical minutiae that interests enthusiasts. But it's the little things that make all of the difference; most especially in regard to this Marvell SATA 6G SSD Performance vs Intel ICH10 article. For example, most consumers don't realize that the SATA controller they connect their storage device to actually rely on a portion of system memory to create a virtual RAM-drive buffer. In many cases, the Intel driver for the ICH9/10 Southbridge reserves a memory space for cache transactions. These memory allocations appear in the form of Cache Line Size and Prefetchable Memory Base, and enable faster transaction throughput. But Intel is not alone. Marvell's SE91XX driver actually follows along the same principals, but with a lack of refinement the differences are quite clear. Benchmark Reviews has exposed a terrible flaw in the design, and only time will tell if SSD performance on the Marvell SATA 6Gb/s controller chips will improve to meet the level Intel's ICH10 Southbridge can deliver. Until then it appears that the marketing hype is simply that, and hopefully Benchmark Reviews has helped you avoid a costly mistake. Questions? Comments? Benchmark Reviews really wants your feedback. We invite you to leave your remarks in our Discussion Forum.
Related Articles:
|
|





Comments
If you check out the schematics of your motherboard (page 8):
#download.gigabyte.eu/FileList/Manual/mb_manual_ga-p55a-ud6_e.pdf
You will see that the Marvell chip gets it's PCI-Express lane from the P55 chip. The P55 chipset runs it's PCI-E 2.0 ports at half speed what results in the horrific performance you're getting.
I think it would be adviced to withdraw this article and save face.
What was that you were saying about saving face?
Nowhere do you mention why the Marvell controller is slower on those boards and what is needed to be done by motherboard manufacturers to make it fast (or which board(s) are implementing it good). Nor do you add a P55 motherboard that has it implemented correctly.
The way you present it, one might conclude that it's a controller deficiency.
There are many ways to get the Marvell up to speed. At least mention one but instead you run the same test five times. To top it of, you conclude (wrongly) that the deficiency is caused by driver optimizations.
Your claim that I "wrongly" concluded that driver was not yet optimized is also made in ignorance. Since Marvell's chipset operates on the same bus as Intel ICH10 controller, the performance should be similar for lower-speed devices. Look at the transfer rate tests, and you'll see that speeds didn't reach 250 MB/s (half-speed) and they were still faster on the Intel ICH.
Furthermore, since bandwidth has little impact on IOPS performance, please explain how 2.5 lanes would impact very low input/output rates.
About the driver:
Obviously you came to that wrong conclusion because you think the Marvell controller is on the same bus as the Intel controller. Tests have shown that the Intel AHCI controller has around 650MB/s effective bandwidth at it's disposal.
I haven't seen P55's PCI-E ports go over 200MB/s (showing that theoretical bandwidth doesn't mean effective bandwidth).
Another thing that bothers me is that if you have so much doubt about the Marvell driver, why didn't you bother trying the MS AHCI driver? Because that would have show you straight away that nothing is wrong with the Marvell driver (even though it's a really early one).
IOPS are in direct relation with bandwidth.
Did you set the 'GSATA Ctrl Mode' to AHCI?
If 'Turbo SATA3' is enabled, the Marvell controller will bypass the P55 chipset and connect straight to the CPU (effectively taking one controller and thus putting the GPU to 8x mode).
Or you're missing something or your board/bios has 'Turbo SATA3' non-functioning.
Even if the P55 was the only chipset to have 6Gb/s ports, the Intel system has a much faster CPU and more RAM. SATA port performance is affected by your system, so how is this a fair "technology comparison" in any way...
I think it's obvious you didn't spend enough time on this article or with this hardware and you should really consider retracting this article.
Hey Milli, you sound very defensive as if you wrote these drivers or designed the chipset on the Marvell side. Could you please look into having some updated drivers released that can fix the BSOD's?
If you read around the ASUS forums, there have been quite a few RMAs related to this chip. I'm just staying away from mobos with Marvell chips in the future since board manufacturers can't figure out how to implement them correctly...
The title mainly says "Marvell SATA-6G SSD Performance vs Intel ICH10". Not that we are saying anything wrong here since we are comparing these exact 2 controllers. The issue is that someone will see the "Sata-6g" included in the title and immediately assume right off the bat that this is going to be a review based off the 'new' SATA 6Gb/s compared to the old SATA 3Gb/s.
The author does a great job at exposing the infancy of the Marvel driver performance compared to the mature Intel drivers performance however us readers are assuming we are going to be looking at a review showing off the full bandwidth of the Marvel controller even though it's only limited to 5GT/s.
Perhaps the title could have been named something like "Marvell 912x driver performance vs Intel ICH10"
That's just my 2 cents :)
Can you imagine? Its wrong. A marketing trick from PC manufactures. Oh sure...itīs 6gbps speed...but it isnīt a native controller. Itīs an addon. So donīt blame us in the future. THIS ARTICLE IS REALLY IMPORTANT! BECAUSE INTEL IS THE BEST AMONG THESE RIDICULOUS MARVELL MANUFACTURES THAT TRICKED ME AND MANY MANY PEOPLE WITH THIS STUPID CONTROLLER. Motherfuc....
Marvell, get jobs at walmart, Please, where you can make a real difference. Your updated firmware that you just made for gig and forget about the other boards is sad, must be to busy handling all the complaints.
Testing raptors in RAID on Marvell, Raptors in RAID on the Ich10r, the Marvell is GARBAGE.
I would love to hear from the IT professionals above how to make the Marvell get higher read write speeds then the Ich10r IN THE REAL WORLD, and not in their fantasy land.
Pathetic speeds from Marvell, have no right to call it 6g, whit its limited using pci-e.
I don't even think if Marvell gets off their butts and puts out a new Firmware for the 88se9128 on Asus boards they can achieve a 600MB transfer.
Thanks again Olin Coles, the only thing decent about having the Marvell, is being able to run an OS on the Marvell and use Ich10r for a RAID set storage, to keep size off the SSD's and speed up by having app's and all small writes to the RAID array,EX- browser. Until the Marvell is on a pci-e 3.0, it should be called Sata 2.5
Otherwise you canīt get them to work as they should.