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Intel 6 (!) SATA 6Gb/s ports

Magic Carpet

Magic Carpet

Diamond Member
It saddens me to see only two 6 Gb/s Intel SATA ports on newer (Z77) boards, whilst the rest of 6 Gb/s ports handled by 3-rd parties like Marvell, etc.

Any news on that? Is it a b/w issue?
 
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It's the same as the previous Intel boards I've used (well, Asus, but Intel chipset), the P8P67 PRO and P8H67-M PRO/EVO.

Admittedly I prefer as few storage controllers on a board as possible. You could always go for AMD chipset boards, which have more than two AMD SATA6 sockets 🙂 I wonder if there's some issue with trying to run too many SATA6-capable devices on the same controller. I don't know what the PCIE lane layouts are like, perhaps it's a bandwidth issue that requires significant changes to resolve?
 
IF I understand correctly the next AMD chipsets will be capable of 8 Sata 3 ports, It. Would seem that Intel would move beyond the two that they currently have.
 
Not that many people have more than 2 SSDs, and those who do will usually put them on a raid controller backed with cache.
 
Yup. For me it's a safe prediction that I'll get 1 SSD in the life of my current computer (let's say 6 - 8 years), unless I win the lottery 🙂
 
AMD has 6 native 6 gb/s SATA ports. I'd like to see status quo. SSD performance is only going up and price is coming down!
 
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sequoia464 said:
IF I understand correctly the next AMD chipsets will be capable of 8 Sata 3 ports, It. Would seem that Intel would move beyond the two that they currently have.
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As it appears...
SB1060 will support an eight SATA 6 Gb/s RAID controller, all ports running at 6 Gb/s. This outpaces Intel's 7-series in terms of SATA 6 Gb/s ports. The SB1060 will offer for the first time a native USB 3.0 SuperSpeed controller.
Click to expand...
 
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Intel should make at least 1 motherboard with 4 Native Sata ports for those of us that have more than 2 SSDs. I dont say it should be cheap but it should be offered. The PCI based addon cards do not work or they are so expensive it defeats the whole purpose. ( LSI).
 
I see why people want the ports to be as fast as possible, but I really don't see the big deal. Plugging the optical disk drive that is used once a month into a slower port isn't a big deal at all. 6 Gb/s doesn't even really matter for platter based drives either.

The question then is who has a desktop with more than two SSDs? Not anyone I know. Certainly less than 0.1% of computer users have this setup so I can see why Intel would cut costs here.
 
Wall Street said:
I see why people want the ports to be as fast as possible, but I really don't see the big deal. Plugging the optical disk drive that is used once a month into a slower port isn't a big deal at all. 6 Gb/s doesn't even really matter for platter based drives either.

The question then is who has a desktop with more than two SSDs? Not anyone I know. Certainly less than 0.1% of computer users have this setup so I can see why Intel would cut costs here.
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I have 2 in my computer and would have been tempted to add a 3rd or even 4th in order to increase my capacity (currently limited to ~450GB of usable space) as my game collection keeps growing with all these steam and amazon sales (my steam games alone can add up to over 600GB)

I even have secondary computers with more than one SSD in them...

Honestly, not only do I want more than 2 x SATA6 ports, I'd like more than 6 ports total on the Intel controller. I was extremely excited when the initial rumors of X79 suggested up to 10 x SATA6 ports and was then very disappointed when it was a mere 6 ports with only 2 of them being SATA6.

Not that'd I'd fill up 10 ports with 10 SSDs, however I could easily see working with 4 SSDs and 4-6 HDDs. Right now I have to compromise and complicate things with 3rd party controllers or even consider forking over even more money for an add-on card.

While I'm excited s1150 chipsets will finally introduce all SATA6 ports, there's still only 6 of them, and will still be stuck with 4 cores on the CPU
 
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I'd probably take 2x 6Gb/s ports + 8x 3Gb/s ports over 6x 6Gb/s ports in most cases.

It'd be interesting if Intel allowed for flexibility in SATA ports, by specifying a port limit (say, 10) and a bandwidth limit (say, all ports together must be rated at 36Gb/s or less - this keeps unrealistic things like 10x SATA 6Gb/s ports from being marketed, when the controller itself is limited to something lower). A hypothetical 2x 1,5Gb/s + 3x 3Gb/s + 4x 6Gb/s setup would work nicely in an enthusiast motherboard.
 
I picked up a few cheap siig 1x cards to handle additional ports. Flashed a nonraid bios and was in business. I use one port for a front esata connection, and 1 internal for an additional drive.
 
Magic Carpet said:
AMD has 6 native 6 gb/s SATA ports. I'd like to see status quo. SSD performance is only going up and price is coming down!
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Problem is that you'd be saturating the DMI-link between the processor and PCH. 6x SATA3 is ~550MB/s x6 = ~3300MB/s. The DMI is only good for ~2000MB/s max...

Of course if Intel used PCIe 3.0 signalling on a new revision, we'd be looking at 4000MB/s. Come on Intel, what's the hold-up...? 😛:thumbsup:
 
Insert_Nickname said:
Problem is that you'd be saturating the DMI-link between the processor and PCH. 6x SATA3 is ~550MB/s x6 = ~3300MB/s. The DMI is only good for ~2000MB/s max...

Of course if Intel used PCIe 3.0 signalling on a new revision, we'd be looking at 4000MB/s. Come on Intel, what's the hold-up...? 😛:thumbsup:
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Hopefully they have a good reason like power consumption or extreme testing to prevent bugs like the P67 launch.
 
How about the Haswell Mobo chipset. Im thinking it has 4 sata3 and 4 sata2 Someone please correct me. thx, gl
 
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smangular said:
Hopefully they have a good reason like power consumption or extreme testing to prevent bugs like the P67 launch.
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I think the power consumption issue would be negligible. Intel could always implement throttling as DMI is basically PCIe with a few extra features. That way you could just drop link speed to PCIe 1.1 level when idle/low-load. Does anyone know if they do that already?. I can't seem to find any documentation...
 
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