Marvell Unveils New SSD 6Gb/s SATA Controller

News
By Douglas Perry
published

Marvell announced mass market availability of its new 88SS9187 SATA controller that will find its way into SSDs for ultrabooks.

The controller comes with a SATA 6Gb (Rev 3.1) interface and supports NAND flash data transfer rates of up to 200 MB/s per channel (up to eight channels are supported). Marvell boasts a sequential read performance of around 500MB/s even at dirty drive conditions.

According to the manufacturer, the device also features "groundbreaking correction capability" based on an ECC engine with Adaptive Read and Write Scheme, as well as on-chip RAID support. 88SS9187 includes a DDR3 DRAM interface that can carry up to 1 GB of memory.

Marvell said it is targeting both enterprise and mobile devices with the controller and claims that the 88SS9187 features the lowest active and stand-by power consumption rates of any SATA 6Gb controller available at this time.

Douglas Perry
See more External SSDs News
16 Comments Comment from the forums
  • LuckyDucky7
    If it beats (or is very near) SF-2281-controlled drives in compressible writes, I'm in.
    If there's support for TRIM on a RAID array, I'm in.

    I still wish a manufacturer would slap on 2-4GB of DRAM cache- though I'd still love to see the benchmarks of a drive with 1GB DRAM and this controller.
    Reply
  • nikorr
    Great!
    Reply
  • xyriin
    Yet another Marvell controller? They need to put out good firmware and drivers for the pieces of junk they currently have out there instead of releasing another beta product. You know there is a problem when you have to downgrade your SSDs from the Marvell SATA III controller to SATA II controller in order to avoid things like disk access lockups.

    /much hate for Marvell due to multiple product failures
    Reply
  • Middleman
    If this thing is as worthless as every other Marvell controller I've ever dealt with, paint me disinterested.

    The only thing more shoddy than the controllers themselves are their drivers, which tend to conflict with others like a drunken sailor with Asperger's at a high society party.
    Reply
  • edlivian
    i think you guys are confused, marvell makes the controller for the most reliable ssd on the market, Crucial m4, intel 510.
    sandforce is the one known for lockups and system crashes
    Reply
  • acyuta
    Marvell???. Now that is a name that implies exactly the opposite. On ASus Sabertooth X58 with 2 Marvell Sata 6Gb ports, I inserted the boot drive, installed win 7 x64, and then the Marvell drivers. The result was BSODs every day. Initially shifted the boot drive to native 3 Gb ports and the BSODs stopped. Then after some time, I totally disconnected the Marvell connection to the MB and am now doing with 6 native 3Gb drivers. I will never buy another Marvell controller as long as I have a choice.
    Reply
  • edlivian
    i would not recommend anything but intel for consumer ahci chipset or raid device, but as an ssd controller, the crucial m4 is known for its reliability, check newegg ratings for it compared to sandforce controllers.
    Reply
  • memadmax
    NICE.

    The DDR3 interface has me very interested in this chip.
    Reply
  • crysex
    Marvell sucks! Those stupid ports give me BSODs every day literally. ruins my whole build!
    Reply
  • Hypertraxx
    Unfortunately i have marvall. I never buy it again under any circumstances
    Reply