Marvell 9128 and SSD Performance

[Baytar]

Hi, I've recently ordered Corsair Force 3 GT 120 GB. My motherboard has Marvell 9128 Sata 3 controller which has really bad write performance. I'll only use the drive for OS and some gaming. Does Marvell controller really effect real world performance ? I'm thinking about cancelling the order but can't decide yet.

[spoilt]

marvell as a whole is giving problems to all force gt

i was tempting to buy a new mobo with the marvell chipset and well ppl from here give them hell. so dont buy it.

whats your north bridge??

x58?

[Turob]

Baytar. Yes the Marvell is horribly slow compared to Intel Sata 3 Controller.

 

Here's a benchmark of my Force 3 120GB x 2 raid0 on the Marvell sata 3 controller

 

http://i138.photobucket.com/albums/q273/elderfoster/corsairatto.png

 

Here's a benchmark of my Force 3 120GB x 2 raid0 on the Intel sata 3 controller

 

http://i138.photobucket.com/albums/q273/elderfoster/corsair.png

 

Nothing else was changed, everything was exactly the same. You can see the difference in performance is huge.

[Ozark_750]

Baytar. Yes the Marvell is horribly slow compared to Intel Sata 3 Controller.

 

Here's a benchmark of my Force 3 120GB x 2 raid0 on the Marvell sata 3 controller

 

Hey Turob - my single gt120 was running at that 400mbs speed until I changed something... but I can't find what I did. I did add SLI to my system and someone said that migh slow it down.... my read speeds went from 400ish mb/s to 200 and I've been trying many different combinations of drivers. What are you (or anyone with these speeds) using? I'm on that infamous marvell 9128 set on my GB p55a-ud4p mb.

[TorinTPG]

Are they any "fixes" for the Force GT drives running on the Marvell 9128 controller?

 

It's pretty silly how terrible the Marvell controller is. If I run with the onboard Intel SATA 2 vs the Marvell SATA 3, there is a pretty large increase in write speeds. Overall, read speeds are about the same between the two

 

http://imageshack.us/f/51/cdrive6gigvs3gig.png/

[UserXX]

From my understanding a lot of the MOBO Marvel controller problems stem from the MOBO and not the SSD. For example the EVGA Marvel controller on the later X58 boards is tied to the PCIe1 slot causing a bottleneck.

[TorinTPG]

That's what I'm think i'll have to do if I want to take advantage of the speeds of this drive :[pouts:

[Ozark_750]

Have you tried it yet? It doesn't seem like you have the PLX chip or NF200 (same?) on that board, so you might have the same problem as I do on my gigabyte board where some brainiac decided that it would be a good idea to share the SLI and SATA3 lanes to cripple the sata. Mine was much faster on the sata2 intel pch than the marvell 9128 sata3 that went to sata 1 with sli.

 

I would love to hear if anyone has the asus p55 board with the PLX / NF200 chip to see if SATA3 is active when using SLI????

[parsec]

The Marvell 91xx chipsets will basically perform in the same way regardless of SATA 6Gb/s SSD used with it. The main problem is these Marvell chips are connected to the board with one PCI-E lane, whose maximum speed is 5Gb/s, yes FIVE Gb/s. That is how Marvell suggests that they be used, and all mother board manufactures do that. If your board displays the Option ROM for the Marvell chipset during POST, it clearly states "... 5Gb/s...", isn't that nice? If you can enable that in your BIOS, do so and check it out for yourself.

 

Next, some boards have a smaller number of PCI-E lanes, due to the chipset usually, and when you use it in SLI mode, the PCI-E lanes are shared with other hardware. The video cards likely get priority over other hardware, with the result you are seeing.

 

The moral of the story is the features plastered all over the mother board box may be true only under certain circumstances, or a lie in the case of the Marvell chip. You'll need to dig deeper into the chipset details to insure all the features you need will function as they should for your intended use.