Hardware Are On-Board SATA 6Gbps Ports Fast Enough?

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2010/10/28/are-on-board-sata-6gbps-ports-fast-enough/1

 

Interesting, but useless. We don't have any drive that goes that fast on SATA. And the fastest drive are on PCI-E. So there is nothing worry about, even down the line after 5 years.

 

Am I right in thinking that apart from SSD development which is flying ahead right now, there isn't anything that is likely to need this speed any time soon right?

 

yeah, sounds like you only need SATA 6gb if you have a new SSD.

 

Looks like the High Point Rocket would be a good way of adding SATA III capability to my Gigabyte EX58-UD5 board. How would this compare to the USB 3.0 equiped Asus U3S6 card?

 

Wow. A simple chipset can mean double to triple the performance quite literally.

I suspect that with this kind of variation, that as SSDs become faster and cheaper and SATA3 becomes more and more common, that the chipset for the SATA3 is going to be as important as the chipset inside the SSD.

 

What drivers were used in the testing as I've heard that the marvell ones are rubbish and to stick with the ms ones.

 

Need? Yes. Mass storage is the bottleneck of PC systems, behind internet access. It's still talking hundreds of MB/s whereas virtually every other component works in 10x++ performance figures.

 

Hmm well its nice to see AMD really has great chipset with its native support, but what Im wondering is how does this compare with RAID setups and using a Raid card in comparison to onboard Raid options? Primarily RAID 0 and RAID 5 setups, heck even RAID 50 (Also known as Raid 0+5 or Raid 5+0) would be nice to see.

 

Out of interest, how long does the Rocket card take to initialize from a cold boot?

 

I'm surprised AMD don't get a more complimentary write up here. The 850 based boards are clearly notably quicker for storage than the price equivalent 1156 boards. They also offer more PCI-E bandwidth, which would surely help if a Rocket card was added.

I know the Intel CPUs are quicker, but native SATA 6gig that is actually pretty quick AND USB3, without detracting from PCI-E bandwidth is surely something that "gamers" would appreciate. No?

 

Useless is the best way to describe the quoted post.

 

i know has he missed the last year of developements?

this is interesting to me, i may welll purchase a c300 128gb soon, and was thinkin the highpoint card was obligatory, obviously not, the onboard ports dont do too bad a job at all. not as good, but you save £40 and some boot time

 

I think that motherboards should carry mix of SATA 1 and SATA 3 ports. 2 SATA150 ports just for optical drives. Why should we waste good SATA2/3 port on a such sluggish device(s)? SATA3 will be plenty for next decade or even more as there is nothing which can replace classic HDDs in short term - SSDs are useless for serious storage applications.

On a RAID side note.
For small storage like 2x1*TB drives in RAID 1 running software RAID via chipset or via simple software RAID card is not an issue. Drop in performance is minimal just like load on CPU and system resources. But if you are serious about RAID then you need some serious hardware. Running software RAID5 with classic HDDs is completely bonkers. RAID 50 is not supported by ICH unless I missed something. Furthermore you need minimum 6 disks to implement it, and to get decent performance you need ~12 drives in the array, at which stage running RAID 50 is not an option because RAID6/60 is much more secure and logical choice.

 

Very well, find me an SSD on the market or coming in the market that reaches the speed of the slowest SATA 6Gbps, and we will talk.
Buying SATA card for not reason, just to have the highest speed possible, is not helpful in anyway, other than reducing your wallet size, as you have nothing to take advantage off the extra speed.

 

Just diffuse things a bit, the point Ph4ZeD is making is that these tests were conducted with the Crucial C300 256GB, so all of the speeds listed in the article are the speed of this SSD over the various connections.

At these kind of speeds, the C300 is brilliant - it loads games and apps noticeably quicker than any other storage device we've tested and generally makes your PC feel faster and more responsive.

Hope that explanations why people are making the comments they are

 

Aha! Makes sense now.
Thanks

 

@ hakuren
With blu ray coming sata 1 might not be enough for optical, therefore making sata 1 useless.

 

I'm sorry, but this test if full of flaws and mistakes.
The JMB362 is NOT a SATA 6Gbps controller, but a standard SATA 3Gbps controller http://www.jmicron.com/JMB362.html

The Gigabyte GA-X58-UD7 uses the Marvell 9128 controller and not the JMB362.

I think whoever did this test need to go over his test results again, as there's something very fishy going on here.