Marvell vs. P67 6 Gb/s - Does it Matter?

[Barryng]

I am planning on installing my new Asus P8P67 Pro mobo tomorrow. I will be upgrading the SSD also to a Samsung 830. Does it matter which 6.0 Gb/s serial ATA controller I use; the Marvell or the P67?

The P67 is obviously integrated into the chip set whereas the Marvell is an add on chip. Therefore it seems the P67 controller is the better choice of the two but I really don't know. I am not building a RAID array and will have only the 128 GB Samsung 830 SSD as my primary C: drive and a WD HDD as a seconday D: drive for bulk storage of pictures, videos, etc.

 

[bmwbaxter]

The port that comes off the chipset will be faster.

 

[RGone]

+1 ^

 

[JonSimonzi]

I was recently wondering the same thing, which ones to set up my Raid0 on, P67 ports or the Marvel ports. Guess that answers my question

 

[bmwbaxter]

I was recently wondering the same thing, which ones to set up my Raid0 on, P67 ports or the Marvel ports. Guess that answers my question

Especially if you are doing a raid setup. I had terrible raid performance on my marvel chip. So I am speaking from experience on that. But general you want to cut down on latencies.

 

[txus.palacios]

Not to mention that if you want to RAID with Marvel and make it bootable, you'll need to load that ROM IIRC, adding extra boot time.

 

[Pvt.Dancer]

I just got my maximus a little less than 2 weeks ago i started on the marvel chipset on accident I installed windows did all the drivers and thought man this is slow!(mind you im normaly on an SSD it died and was out underwarrenty) even for a HDD so i re read the manuel and found out i was connected to the marvel i went in changed the plug and saw and instant improvment on HDD speed.

P67 all the way!

 

[JonSimonzi]

So, if the Marvell controller is worse performance than the P67 controller, why is it even included on the boards?

 

[bmwbaxter]

So, if the Marvell controller is worse performance than the P67 controller, why is it even included on the boards?

because it is faster than sata 2 ports and it will increase your max number of drives by 2. so for someone who is using to build a home server it will allow more drives. Like possibly booting off the marvel and having your raid array of drives off of the chipset.

 

[Barryng]

Thanks for all the good responses to my question. Looks like the information is appreciated by others too.

 

[txus.palacios]

And also because of marketing.

I've never used more than 4 drives on my computers. And if for any reason I needed a lot of drivers for a server or so, I'd grab some PERCs or Intel RAID cards.

 

[veganian]

Best P67 / Marvell combination?

because it is faster than sata 2 ports and it will increase your max number of drives by 2. so for someone who is using to build a home server it will allow more drives. Like possibly booting off the marvel and having your raid array of drives off of the chipset.

Hello, I'm a newbie on here. I would like some advice if possible please. I had a HDD for the OS connected to one of the Marvell sockets and twin 1TB HDDs in a RAID 0 array connected to the P67 sockets. I've just bought a SDD (on which I'm planning to install the OS & games) and am now wondering what the best configuration might be. The easiest option would be to just plug the SSD straight into the Marvell socket as you suggest, right? But one of the posts in this thread indicated that the Marvell socket was painfully slow (albeit for an HDD I think). Do you think any speed differences would be noticeable and worth the additional hassle of setting up RAID on the Marvell controller and putting the SSD on the P67? Any assistance would be much appreciated.


Corsair TX650 power supply
Asus P8P67 B3 Rev 3.0
Core i5 2500k with Titan Fenrir Evo cooling
8GB Corsair DDR3 1600MHz
Radeon HD5750 1GB
Soundblaster X-Fi Extreme Audio
128GB OCZ Agility 3
1TB WD Caviar (x2; RAID 0)
Fractal Design R3 case (only 2 fans in use)
W7 Home Premium
Samsung BX2440 screen

I use the system for:
Gaming but nothing too taxing (Portal 2, Half Life 2 etc)
Photo processing & editing
2D CAD work
Watching occasional HD video

 

[txus.palacios]

Necromancy!

I think you should start a new thread, but I'll try and answer your question now. Connect the HDDs to the P67 SATA-2 ports (even if they're sold as SATA-3 SuperSpeed amazing drives, they won't choke a SATA-2, believe me). Then, connect the SSD to one of the P67 SATA-3 ports. Ignore the Marvel ports. Third party controllers that are not from LSI are usually awful.

 

[Woomack]

Marvell controller is good only for HDD when you need mainly sequential transfers ( backup drives etc ). Even though new Marvells are better then there are still issues with random transfers. Other thing is that older Marvell series are not supporting optical drives. Try to burn any DVD on these ports and will probably fail.

SATA2 ports are better than Marvell for SATA3 SSD just because the only thing where you really see difference between SSD and HDD are random transfers and Intel ports will be always faster especially when you enable cache options.
What more if you have LSI controller without cache then it will be slower than Intel integrated controllers.

On integrated controllers you always connect SSD to Intel SATA3 ports ( some board manufacturers are even leaving sticker where to connect SSD ).
When you have no SATA3 ports ( like X58 boards ) then you use SATA2 Intel ports.

 

[PS-Matt]

Your question actually lines up exactly with some testing we did about a year and a half ago (even with the P67 chipset). Here is the article: http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/SATA-Controller-Performance-Explored-87

Basically, Intel ports will be faster than Marvell and are much, much more reliable. I would avoid using third-party controller (Marvell, ASMedia, etc.) unless you absolutely have to. And even then I would only use them for secondary storage drives and never for an OS drive.