Faulty Marvell Chips Delay SATA 6G Launch 90
Vigile writes "The SATA 6G standard offers more than simply a faster 6.0 Gb/s data throughput speed, to wit: improved NCQ support, better power management, and a new connector to support 1.8-inch drives. While modern-day, spindle-based hard drives struggle to keep up with SATA 3G speeds, modern SSDs are nearly saturating the existing standard, and a move to SATA 6G was welcome in the hardware community. It looks like that technology will be delayed, though. The only chip supporting the standard today, the Marvell 88SE9123, is having major issues. Motherboard vendors including ASUS and Gigabyte, which had planned on releasing SATA 6G technology using the chip on Intel Lynnfield platform motherboards later this summer, are having to remove the Marvell 88SE9123 and redesign their boards at the last minute due to significant speed and reliability issues."
6G a stop-gap solution for high-end SSDs, anyway (Score:4, Insightful)
Even the 6G standard won't hold for high-end SSDs (which seem to be raid striped in one unit, AFAIK). The long-term solution for those are ones that connect via PCIe, so this doesn't seem to be that big a deal, really.
This is surprising (Score:2, Insightful)
To be bad enough that these low-end board shops would reject it this Marvell part must be truly heinous. Asus et al. usually don't hesitate to ship boards with badly flawed components. Cox talked about this [kerneltrap.org] a few years ago.
If you want good SATA avoid the third party chips these board makers integrate. Especially the RAID crap. Wait for Intel to build it into their regular chipsets.
Re:Interface speed only (Score:3, Insightful)
*cough*Doesn't increase bandwidth*cough*
Re:Interface speed only (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Interface speed only (Score:3, Insightful)
What manufacturer is going to make SATA SSD's that can saturate the fastest SATA port?
The same idiot manufacturers who deliver super-high sequential reads at the expense of everything else. There's a jumble of drives running off a particular J-Micron controller (or two :P), that deliver faster sequential reads than the Intel X25-E, but have random access times in the 50ms range (average). That's five times slower than a cheap 5400rpm notebook drive! They still sell like hotcakes because they're cheap, and we all know how much America loves cheap garbage. You could stick a SATA port out the side of a fresh turd, and if you price it low enough, some dumb fuck will buy it.
SATA 6G is too slow, yes, but the companies involved seem to be interested in controlling their steady income by keeping everyone on an upgrade treadmill. If they had given us 6G at the very start, they would not have been able to milk the industry over the last six years with these minor upgrades and feature enhancements. Look at Firewire, ignoring Apple's idiocy, it was a very fast external bus that was far ahead of its competitors in terms of performance, reliability and ease of use. It was so good that even the 800mbit upgrade is considered redundant, the old standard is "fast enough" for most uses.
Better get used to it though, SATA is the new bottleneck, and it will be for years to come. There's just no way around it. It took this long for people to finally ditch IDE, even if there were a new contender to leave SATA's generationally-challenged performance in the dust, the industry simply is not ready to change interfaces again.
Marvell == suckage in Si form (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, Marvell chips have cost me more grief on Linux installs than all other vendors combined. If this gets mobo vendors to design out Marvell, then I say: "Grand!".
Regular HDDs saturate SATA 3.0Gbps links (Score:3, Insightful)
"Me too", not just Linux. (Score:3, Insightful)
I have to agree there. Marvell chips have given me nothing but grief, both in Windows and Linux, both network and ATA. They made me buy a SATA DVD writer to replace the fully functional PATA device, as well as a Silicon Image-based SATA controller to attach harddisks (couldn't use the Intel controller, because MSI still insists on placing the "good" SATA connectors under the GPU cooler).
All in all, I'm happy about anything bad happening to Marvell.