SSD and Intel chipset

[ghost41]

Anyone had any experience of SSD drives on an Intel chipset,X38 X48 ect

I have read somewhere that they seem to have issues over P35 P45 chipsets which apparently are more stable ? Can anyone confirm this.

 

[Stonedofmoo]

I can't see why that would be, they both share the ICH9R/ICH10R chipsets. I've personally not heard that before unless you're talking about the OCZ Core2 SSDs. The fault lies with them however, not Intel's southbridge.

 

[The Halk]

There's two separate issues.

The first is that SSD drives have to erase before they can write, which makes them very slow at random access writes, which can cause problems if Windows treats the drive like a mechanical drive. Windows does not have native support for SSD drives, and requires certain features to be disabled/enabled in order for the drives to perform well.

Some intel chipsets struggle to provide enough bandwidth for the SSD drives when they're in a RAID0 array, as the read throughput is far greater than mechanical drives.

 

[jimmy29]

Intel chipsets have a maximum throughput of 80MB/s which can restrict faster SSDs. My Mtron disk should do 120MB/s read but it is capped to 80 by the southbridge.

 

[Stonedofmoo]

Intel chipsets have a maximum throughput of 80MB/s which can restrict faster SSDs. My Mtron disk should do 120MB/s read but it is capped to 80 by the southbridge.

I don't think that's the case any more. If you're still experiencing that I'd highly recommend a new BIOS and latest drivers. My own ICH10R RAID 0 array with 3 ordinary hard disks manages 350MB/sec. How would that be possible with a limit of 80MB/sec on each drive.

That's aside from the fact the mods posted benchmarks of the new Intel MLC/SLC SSDs only this month in RAID0 on a ICH10R southbridge posting 500MB/s reads.

 

[jimmy29]

I do remember someone mentioning that enabling RAID fixed the issue?? I'll have a look for a new bios though, would be nice to get the full potential from the disk