SATA Bandwidth

[deadmeatlg]

Hello, For example 4 ports SATA 6Gb/s is that per port or over all ?. Is there a net limit to the amount of bandwidth sata can handle.

 

[jaquith]

Welcome to Tom's Forums!

It depends upon the MOBO and Chipsets used. For example, the Marvell 91xx are x1 PCIe lane and the maximum is 360~380MB/s in contrast the Marvell 918x are x2 PCIe lanes and the maximum is 550~590 MB/s; both use shared bandwidth. In general native SATA3 on the Intel P67/Z68 can achieve ~590 MB/s. but is limited to 2 ports.

Further, a 'SATA 6Gb/s' on a HDD or SSD refers to the Interface and not the speed of the drive. The only 4 port 'SATA 6Gb/s' that comes to mind are a mixture of Intel {not shared} + Marvell {Shared w/various number of lane(s)} but the AMD only came in 6x6Gb/s and those are shared.

So what 4x6Gb/s MOBO are you referring to??

 

[deadmeatlg]

it was an example, Im wanting to know how much bandwidth can go through a sata chip and im not talking about the HDD interface thats why i put this in the mobo chipset section.

I was thinking about raiding 2 of those 500MB/s drives but as i started reading (I dont know much about PC) it got very complex with different chips being good or bad and some shared with pcie some running at almost half speed, yet some were raided at over 1000MB/s so im guessing 6Gb/s isnt the net cap but what is and at what cost?

 

[jaquith]

First thing I said, "It depends upon the MOBO and Chipsets used." Often what people do in large RAID 0 with e.g. OCZ Vertex SSD is to purchase a Dedicated RAID Card with at least x8 PCIe lanes. Otherwise then next step down is to use Native SATA3 Chipsets eg P67/Z68 and use the Intel SATA3 in RAID 0 for (2) SSD.

A good LSI RAID Card will cost as much or more than the MOBO. The other good alternative is to use a PCIe based SSD with internal H/W RAID 0 e.g. OCZ RevoDrive. There's no comparison, the OCZ RevoDrive is as good as it gets for excellent RAID - the internal/dedicated RAID controller is superior than taking individual SSD's and using the MOBO's onboard RAID.

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