Controller card for SSD

[Evil-I]

Hi All,

Have an Asus P6 X58D-E motherboard in my main system that does me extremely well, but has the one caveat that the on board Marvel chipset driven Sata 3 ports are a little underwhelming performance wise with my Samsung 256 Gb 840 Evo SSD. I tend to get around 300-350MBs when in theory the drive is capable of over 500.

Is there a cheap'ish card anyone can recommend that will give me the full speed of my SSD? I had a look at the Startech ones that OC stock, but the reviews seem to suggest they aren't much better than my onboard on the speed front. I also had a quick look at various more butch RAID cards but again, unless you go for the higher end products performance with SSDs seems to be a little disappointing.

Any advice appreciated!

E-I

 

[ZXSpectrum]

Unfortunately the Startech unit is also a Marvell based controller and as you have seen I also have had poor performance. Asus actually do a combo USB3/SATA3 controller card that is compatible but again not great performance. I really don't know why Intel have not produced a small add in card utilising Intel RST chip.

 

[Evil-I]

Hi there,

Thanks for the response.

Yes, that's the conclusion I've come to, no decent low price simple controller cards capable of SSD speeds.

The annoyance is both of my OCZ Vertex 2 e's have failed (pretty much a day after the 3 year warranty ran out) and those in RAID0 on the intel chipset gave me better performance than the single 840 evo on the marvel 6Gbps (I was getting about 500Mbs)

I suppose I could stick another Evo in and put it all back on the intel driven sata ports again.... At least then under sata2 with RAID0 i was getting around 500Mbs. Funnily enough when I tried running both sata2 drives on the marvell in raid 0, performance was less than 400Mbs so that just seems to be the fastest the marvell chipset can achieve whether its raid or a single fast drive.

Can't really justify the couple of hundred quid an appropriate big boys card would cost and apart from this my system screams, so certainly not looking to upgrade motherboard cpu etc....

Anyway, thanks for advice!

E-I