SATA 6Gb/s Controller for OCZ Agility 3

I swapped out my Vertex 2 for an Agility 3 SSD when I replaced my X58 mobo with a Asus P6X58D-E.. The board has 2 SATA 6Gb/s ports but these are run by a Marvell 9128 controller and performance is not as good as it could be ..

I can't afford the upgrade to a P67/Z68 setup at the mo so I figured the easiest way to achieve best performance would be a SATA 6Gb/s PCIe card.. I'm struggling to find any benchmarks of SATA 3 SSDs on any of these cards however..

I was looking at the Highpoint RocketRAID 620 card.. Most likely the none RAID version but if I got the RAID enabled card I could easily stick another Agility 3 SSD in later..

So does anyone know of any reviews or anything about which controller card would be best ta use? Cheeers

well for starters they would be faster for sure since they would be using the PCIE 2.0 lanes. that is asumming you have a free slot, since some info points to intel using pci 1.0 lanes still on the SB. the other thing is if you have other devices hooked up to the SB via say a USB 3.0 support, that is another onboard chip added on like the SATA III chip. depending on how much you have going on, im not suprised your seeing low performance. in the first place though it is a marvell controller and not all of the add-on chips like this provide the best performance for SSD's. If you decied later on to go with a raid setup, depending on how many drives in the array. you will want one of the mid range raid cards, one in the $200 range would do.

at this point though you would more then likely get better performance on the intel SATA ports even if they are SATA II. as intel has put in alot of work to make sure their SB's or newer PCH's provide the best performance to SSD's.

What drive are you using? If this is your Agility 3, then the Mavell controller will beat the living crap out of the Intell SATAII. If you want to see benchmarks, check out MaximumPC. I cant find the article online but I beleive its only 2 months old.

Funny, people say to stay off the Marvell controller and use the native intel one....

+1 to Evil.

I would like to see benchmarks... If the Intel SATAII controller is better then the Marvell SATAIII then whats the point. I can beleive that this is the case, but I would like to see it tested. I do fear old drivers and old drives. You should be able to swap controllers and do tests on both.

Ehh, I meant from SATA6 vs SATA6 which is what I THOUGHT this thread was about... it doesnt appear to be. My bad.

BUT in S6 v S6 Intel vs marvel, Intel controller does perform better last I recall.

Anubis_386 said:

I swapped out my Vertex 2 for an Agility 3 SSD when I replaced my X58 mobo with a Asus P6X58D-E.. The board has 2 SATA 6Gb/s ports but these are run by a Marvell 9128 controller and performance is not as good as it could be

Click to expand...

I'm assuming the partition is aligned? I have not done any tests on the Marvel controller, but regardless you should still see some significant jumps in R/W speeds.

EarthDog said:

Funny, people say to stay off the Marvell controller and use the native intel one....

+1 to Evil.

Click to expand...

It would still be correct here since the SB on SATA II wont be limited in the way the SATA III controller would be. as it is attached to the PCIE 1.0 lanes.

GreenJelly said:

I would like to see benchmarks... If the Intel SATAII controller is better then the Marvell SATAIII then whats the point. I can beleive that this is the case, but I would like to see it tested. I do fear old drivers and old drives. You should be able to swap controllers and do tests on both.

Click to expand...

while this is the post i found in google it is worth noting that he is using a slot add-on card not onboard. he would be using the PCIE 2.0 lanes make a direct comparision rather hard as i stated above.
http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1036522525&postcount=6

there is a review that came out prolly about 4-6months ago showing. the maverell controller being choked as it was also sharing BW with the USB 3.0 onboard chip. basicly both when talking to the SB at the same time with alot of stuff being moved or data flow. was slowing each other down, it was showing the main reason being the pcie 1.0 buss being used on the SB for ICH10(R).