SATA6 card that works with Gigabyte's EP5-45-UD3p?
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From: Jack on 31 May 2010 19:29 Searched everywhere for the answer and can't find it. Or is an Intel M25 SSD the answer?
From: kony on 1 Jun 2010 22:48 On Mon, 31 May 2010 13:29:26 -1000, Jack <Jack(a)haw'ntel.net> wrote: >Searched everywhere for the answer and can't find it. > >Or is an Intel M25 SSD the answer? ? Any card that takes a slot that you have free on the motherboard "is supposed" to work. However, I don't think it is going to be cost effective if it has SATA300 instead of SATA150, you will get most of the performance from SATA300.
From: GT on 4 Jun 2010 09:24 "kony" <spam(a)spam.com> wrote in message news:cfhb069vf5us05s5it5h98i9iv4fctr8o8(a)4ax.com... > On Mon, 31 May 2010 13:29:26 -1000, Jack <Jack(a)haw'ntel.net> > wrote: > >>Searched everywhere for the answer and can't find it. >> >>Or is an Intel M25 SSD the answer? > > > ? Any card that takes a slot that you have free on the > motherboard "is supposed" to work. > > However, I don't think it is going to be cost effective if > it has SATA300 instead of SATA150, you will get most of the > performance from SATA300. Isn't SATA faster than PCI, so a PCI SATA600 card would be pointless?
From: Paul on 4 Jun 2010 12:38 GT wrote: > "kony" <spam(a)spam.com> wrote in message > news:cfhb069vf5us05s5it5h98i9iv4fctr8o8(a)4ax.com... >> On Mon, 31 May 2010 13:29:26 -1000, Jack <Jack(a)haw'ntel.net> >> wrote: >> >>> Searched everywhere for the answer and can't find it. >>> >>> Or is an Intel M25 SSD the answer? >> >> ? Any card that takes a slot that you have free on the >> motherboard "is supposed" to work. >> >> However, I don't think it is going to be cost effective if >> it has SATA300 instead of SATA150, you will get most of the >> performance from SATA300. > > Isn't SATA faster than PCI, so a PCI SATA600 card would be pointless? > The problem with both SATA III and USB3 chips, is the choice of interfaces they decided on. (And no, PCI would be a particularly bad choice for this, as desktop PCI is 133MB/sec max :-) ) The PCI Express they're using, is capable of more than that, but there are still issues they haven't addressed very well. ******* This is a SATA III card, carelessly plugged into a PCI Express x1 revision 1 (250MB/sec lanes) motherboard. The bottleneck is the bus, and the SATA ports won't work any better than the SATA II ports on the Southbridge. This is a waste of $35 for the controller card, if you do it this way. 600MB/sec ----------- Drive #1 250MB/sec / PCI Express x1 Rev.1 slot --------------- SATA III chip \ ----------- Drive #2 600MB/sec If the motherboard has a Revision 2 slot, the picture looks like this. A Rev.2 slot is backward compatible with Rev.1, so if a Rev.1 type card is plugged in, the speed automatically drops to 250MB/sec. The SATA III card would be Rev.2, so it should be trying to run at the 500MB/sec lane rate. I don't have a copy of the PCI Express spec, but one of the issues with Rev.2, is the PCI Express clock must be extremely low jitter for Rev.2. And I think that issue is what makes it a problem to make Rev.2 more prevalent in motherboard designs (for *all* the slots, not just video slots). Many motherboards now, support a mix of slot revisions, with most of the x1 slots being Revision 1. So you can't find that many actual x1 Rev.2 slots. There is still a potential bottleneck here, but is isn't as bad. This is still worth doing. 600MB/sec ----------- Drive #1 500MB/sec / PCI Express x1 Rev.2 slot --------------- SATA III chip \ ----------- Drive #2 600MB/sec ******* On a P45 based motherboard, the Northbridge has a PCI Express x16 interface which can be split into two pieces. You can connect that interface to two video card slots, each running at x8. But the important aspect of this, is the interface supports Revision 2, and the two halves of the interface can run at different speeds. (One slot can run a Rev.1 card, while the second video card slot runs a Rev.2 card. Intel made them effectively independent of one another.) What the Intel datasheet doesn't make clear, is whether any external bifurcation chips, makes a difference to the operating mode. Bifurcation is in the data path, but since I don't know what chip numbers are used, I don't know if the data is reclocked or not. (In this picture, the four tiny chips to the left of the blue video card slot, are the bifurcation chips used for lane switching between slots.) http://images17.newegg.com/is/image/newegg/13-128-358-S03?$S640W$ The GA-EP45-UD3P motherboard comes in three different revisions. I grabbed one motherboard manual, but they don't go into that level of detail, to verify in fact, that the x8/x8 mode supports Rev.2. The Intel P45 datasheet looks supportive of running Rev.2, so you could do this with your two video slots. This is how I'd do it, if buying a SATA III controller card for that motherboard. Video_Slot_#1 ---- PCI Express Video Card (running x8 Rev.2, 4GB/sec) Video_Slot_#2 ---- SATA III Controller Card (running x1 Rev.2, 500MB/sec) The PCI Express x1 slots on the GA-EP45-UD3P, come from an ICH10R. And the ICH10R supports Revision 1 interfaces. So you wouldn't particularly want to use the x1 slots on the motherboard, for a SATA III controller. The 250MB/sec limit of the ICH10R provided lanes, would make the SATA III card pointless. You'd be just as well off in that case, using the existing SATA II ports on the Southbridge. So the video card slot is the only reasonable alternative slot, to be plugging in the SATA III card. ******* If the SATA III chip had PCI Express x4 as an interface, the chip would see a reduced potential sales market. But at least early adopters would get to see every ounce of transfer performance from at least one SATA connector on the card. If they'd used an x4 interface, the minimum bandwidth would have been 1GB/sec, and 2GB/sec with Rev.2 lanes. Which would have given users a better taste of performance. The highest transfer rate to date on a SATA III interface, is 355MB/sec, but I suspect when Southbridges come out with native SATA III on them, we'll see a slight improvement on that. The current SATA III card is still fast, but some day, it might be eclipsed (slightly) by other forms of SATA IIi solution. HighPoint Rocket 620 $35 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115072 Picture of card - PCI Express Revision 2 x1 slot, two SATA III ports. http://www.cwol.com/serial-ata/images/rocket620.jpg Using one of those cards for regular (rotating) hard drives, is a waste of time and money. Only the burst transfer speed would change, which is of no consequence. Users want blazing fast sustained (large file) transfer rates, and hard drives are still severely limited by head to media rate (about 125MB/sec). Currently, the only storage device worthy of one of those cards, is this. 355MB/sec read, 215MB/sec write, $679.99. This is a good test for the $35 controller card. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148349 Other manufacturers will come out with SATA III SSDs, and there is a good chance the write rate will be higher on the next ones that come out. One question, would be to what extent the 355MB/sec read rate of the Crucial C300, is affected by the 500MB/sec Rev.2 limitation of those (early) controller cards. It would be interesting, some day, to see if that drive does any better, when a real SATA III Southbridge comes out. ******* It is just as easy, to plug a couple regular SATA II SSD drives into the Southbridge and do RAID 0. Two of these in RAID 0, would beat the performance level of a single Crucial C300. RAID 0 is a less reliable storage mode, in that either drive failing, leads to array failure. And with SSDs anyway, you'd want to have backups to fall back on, in case of trouble. Like a firmware issue... http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167014 (Fun with SSDs...) http://www.anandtech.com/show/2974/crucial-s-realssd-c300-an-update-on-my-drive Paul
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