Asus P8Z77-V Deluxe and 3 SSDs

piquet00 · Apr 28, 2013

Hi,

I have just bought a third SSD to add to my system, and chose the Samsung 840 Pro Series 256Gb for it reported excellent performance.

I am running Windows 7 Professional and have AHCI enabled.

My other 2 SSDs are Crucial M4 256Gb and are plugged into the 2 Intel SATA6 ports. One runs Windows 7 and the other has data. Both of these perform as expected - Samsung Magician measures these drives around:

540 MB/s sequential read, 240 MB/s sequential write
46800 IOPS random read, 40000 IOPS random write

My new supposedly high performance Samsung is plugged into the top Marval SATA6 port, but Magician rates it:

300 MB/s sequential read, 170 MB/s write
49000 IOPS random read, 30000 IOPS random write

I was expecting the Samsung to be a little better than the M4s. Is there anything I can do? I have tried it plugged into the lower Marvell SATA6 port but the Magician software reports that AHCI is not enabled and can't read the status of the drive.

Thanks for any help,

Phil

Sakkura · Apr 28, 2013

The Marvell controller is not as good as the chipset controller, so performance suffers because of the port.

piquet00 · Apr 28, 2013

Thanks Sakkura, that makes sense.

Are there any alternatives to boost performance - like a PCIe SATA card?

Thanks,

Phil

Sakkura · Apr 28, 2013

A PCIe SATA card might do the trick, yes. But I'd try swapping the 840 Pro with one of the m4s first, just to see what performance you get.

piquet00 · Apr 28, 2013

Good idea Sakkura - I did this and got:

555 MB/s sequential read, 475 MB/s sequential write
98365 IOPS random read, 65725 IOPS random write

So the Samsung performs better than the M4 (as expected) when connected to the Intel SAT3 port.

I plugged the M4 into the Marvel port and got results slightly worse than I quoted above for the Samsung in the same port.

Marvel is NOT the word, eh?

Would a PCIe SATA controller be the way to go?

Another option might be to use the SSD caching on the 2 Marvell ports - if I used the 256Gb M4 + a 3Tb SATA3 hard disk, would that offer decent performance, or is a 256Gb SSD overkill?

At the moment my second M4 holds my latest camera images and the rest are stored on a 2Tb SATA2 drive. The M4 renders previews in Lightroom a lot faster than images on the 2Tb drive, but it's not a great solution because I have to manage what I keep on the SSD manually. Every 6 months, I move images over to the 2Tb disk to make room for new ones - not great!

Cheers,

Phil

Sakkura · Apr 28, 2013

piquet00 :

Well, yeah. There's this company that makes some nice PCIe SATA controller chips. They're called Ma... I mean... Murbell. Yeah, Murbell.

I have to admit I'm not an expert on PCIe SATA controllers. But it should definitely be the option with the best performance potential.

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