Corsair Force GT on X58 Extreme6

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Re: Corsair Force GT on X58 Extreme6

The factors to be considered are, what are you using the SSD for on that board? As the OS drive? Small file, 4K performance is more important for an OS drive than very high sequential read speed. If you're streaming videos from the SSD, or reading other large files, then sequential read speed is king.

The real shame is that most X58 boards use one of the Marvell 912x chips, which can only be connected to one PCIe lane. That limits the speed to 5Gb/s, rather than the full 6Gb/s of SATA III. That is also not one PCIe lane per port on the 912x chips, that is one PCIe lane total. Put two drives on a Marvell 912x, such as in RAID, and you're down to 2.5Gb/s per port, lower than SATA II at 3Gb/s.

Why more boards don't use the Marvell 9182 SATA chipset is really a shame, I guess it costs $5 more than the 912x chips. OTOH, the Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge boards do not have anywhere near as many PCIe lanes as X58 or X79 boards do, and heaven forbid that board manufactures take PCIe lanes away from the video card slots, which are already limited to 8 lanes when using 2 slots, instead of using them for the 9182 chip.

X58 boards were current just before SATA III SSDs were released, and Intel was still using their SATA II chipset on those boards. I have a X58 board, so I'm a member of this left behind club too. What I did was use a RAID 0 volume of SSDs on the Intel SATA II ports, which with two SSDs, equates to one good SATA III SSD on an Intel SATA III chipset. A bit slower to boot than my Intel SATA III boards, but by only a few seconds.

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Re: Corsair Force GT on X58 Extreme6

A SandForce controller SSD as an OS drive on the Marvell SATA ports (and older driver) is asking for trouble. I would suggest using the Windows 7 msahci driver on the Marvell chips, no RAID of course but they will be worse in RAID. There are newer improved Marvell drivers availiable, but NOT on your boards download page, unless it is dated 2012. Then again, I wonder if blaming the Marvell chipset for all the problems a SSD might have is really valid.

If your standard of performance for a SSD is simply sequential, large file read speed, then benchmarks "tell you" the Intel SATA II interface is slower. If you check the other areas of performance, such as 4K read and write, the Intel interface is better. Booting an OS is not reading one giant file, it is many smaller files, so small file performance is important.

There is not one simple recipe of SATA chipset, driver, and board that is always better (except for the Intel or AMD SATA III chipsets), you must experiment and see what works best with your hardware. It also depends on what your PC usage is, if you are reading large files most of the time, whatever gives you the highest sequential read will likely be the best. But you won't know what is optimal unless you try.