Battle of the SATA 3.0 Controllers

Deathspawner writes "Think that all SATA 3.0 (6Gb/s) controllers are alike? As Techgage explores, that's not the case. While most SATA 3.0 controllers do deliver the performance promised, the most popular offering on the market does not — at least where bandwidth-busting SSDs are concerned. The controller comes from Marvell, and was bundled on all motherboards prior to AMD and Intel launching their own SATA 3.0 solutions. In some cases, Marvell's controller is half as fast as the others, making it no better than a SATA 2.0 controller. For those with motherboards using a Marvell controller, the solutions are few; build a new PC, or invest in a super-expensive add-in card."

The cheapest one is crappiest? Say it ain't so!

[jandrese]

This happens all the time with computers, but especially with drive controllers it seems. The guy who rushes his half baked solution to market first at the lowest price ends up with millions of copies in nearly every computer in the world. Then a couple of years later when people start really using them, they discover that in fact the chip is full of bugs and slow and corrupts your data. It happened with the CMD 640 back when IDE first came out, the SiI 3112 when SATA first came out, and now it's happening against with SATA2. Most early Firewire controllers were total crap too, and the cheap ones still are.

The worst part is that nearly every peripheral card manufacturer is going to use that same chip because it's the cheapest. So even if you try to get around a buggy chip on your motherboard by buying a PCIe card, you'll just end up with a second copy of that broken chip. It's infuriating and I don't expect the situation to change anytime soon. That is why I always wait when a new storage access standard comes out, it's just a solid bet that the first generation chips will be way more trouble than they're worth.