Hi I have an Asus P6X58D PREMIUM motherboard and have just upgraded to a Corsair Force 3 SSD. I have benchmarked the drive and the best I can get is around 200 read and about 180 write. I've read the SATA3 controller isn't great on the X58 boards but is there a PCI-E X1 board thats recommended to get nearer the 550 / 515 spec? My system spec is i930 @ 4.2Ghz, Corsair H50 Cooling, Asus P6X58D Premium, 12GB XMS3 1600, Corsair Force 3 120GB SSD, 2TB Seagate Sata3, Corsair 850Watt PSU, Zotac 480 Amp! Thanks!
Yes, I remember reading that, here (scroll to 'Marvell controller' section): http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2009/11/16/investigating-sata-6gbps-performance/1 So older boards may channel an additional sata iii controller (such as the Marvell on your board) through a single pci-e channel which limits the total bandwidth to a theoretical maximum bandwidth of 500 MB/s, below the max read on your sandforce drive. This is exacerbated if you connect 2 drives to the marvell controller as the bandwidth would have to be shared if both drives are in use, certainly the first thing I would check is that all other drives are attached to the intel controller sata ports and leave your single SSD on the marvell. After that if you want to improve performance then I would suggest at least a 4x pci-e sata iii add in card to avoid bottlenecking issues, more lanes will mean bandwidth bottlenecking is less of an issue (and if you add in more drives to these controllers then expect bottlenecking to become an issue again unless you get some kind of ninja full hardware enterpri$e card, pricy).
From what I've heard though, these add-in cards don't always support TRIM, which would inevitably lead to degradation in the performance of the drive over time. Does this apply to all add-in cards or are there some that support TRIM?
I would say that if the add in card is RAID only it will not support TRIM. The TRIM command is part of the AHCI spec so any add in card that supports AHCI should support TRIM, hopefully someone here can confirm.
Thanks for the advice. I don't suppose there are any that could be recommended. I will for now move the HDD over to the SATA2 Controller. Thanks Mark
No - the shonky Highpoint thing that bittech recommended does not support trim (confirmed by Highpoint)... it's 99.9999% that the Asus card (which is better value for money) also doesn't as, other than adding USB3 & allowing 2 SSDs to be connected in non-raid with better bandwidth (as it's a 4x card), it uses an equivalent Marvell controller (the 9123 & 9128 are interchangable). & even with the higher end cards, even if you put a SSD in non-raid then it will not support it. [NB the SATA/SAS exception (as it's also in their latest pcie offerings) atm being the OCZ Talos with their proprietary VCA 2.0 tech - which 'may' come to their consumer non-pcie drives at some point as a f/w upgrade.] Yeah, the confusion came about because one of the b/ming things (AS-SSD or CDM) reports that Windows is set up for trim *not* that the controller/SSD is. Otherwise (to the OP) as you've chosen a SF based SSD, they are significantly less reliant on trim than the others - to the point of it having little, if any, gain.
