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."
Re:6G a stop-gap solution for high-end SSDs, anywa (Score:3, Interesting)
The PCIe versions of SSDs I've see so far doesn't seem to support booting. That's a major crimp in their usefulness. Also, they're not all that useful in laptops.
Re:6G a stop-gap solution for high-end SSDs, anywa (Score:3, Interesting)
The PCIe versions of SSDs I've see so far doesn't seem to support booting. That's a major crimp in their usefulness.
True, but that's temporary. I've heard the next major crop of them coming out over the next quarter or so will be bootable. I certainly wouldn't buy one until they ARE bootable.
Also, they're not all that useful in laptops.
Laptops have PCIe connections available, too; that shouldn't be a problem.
Re:Interface speed only (Score:3, Interesting)
TFA said "nearly saturating", but regardless...
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=24 [anandtech.com]
250MB/s is just below the theoretical limit of SATA 3Gb/s, which is 300MB/s. It's possible that there are still other bottlenecks beside the hard drive.
I also have seen SSD RAID benchmarks somewhere, but I don't remember where.
Re:Interface speed only (Score:5, Interesting)
What manufacturer is going to make SATA SSD's that can saturate the fastest SATA port?
Sounds to me like a bad idea. Surely there are some tradeoffs between speed and some other also important metric. Ex, faster might mean larger erase block sizes.
It is likely that Intel could have made their product much faster, but without any benefit at all to doing so, they wouldn't.
This new SATA, while important, it sort of too-little-too-late. We need a much higher ceiling, and we need it yesterday.