Speed of Add-On Storage Controller - MSI P55A-GD55

[UaVaj]

motherboard in question is a socket 1156 MSI P55A-GD55

comes with an add-on Marvell controller for SATA3 6Gb/s support.

anyone know if such add-on storage controller is a true SATA3 utilizing at least 4-pci-lanes (1000MB/s theoritical / ~750MB/s actual)?

also, is there a lag during boot up from secondary controller? vs the P55 chipset?

 

[suteck]

Speed will be almost the same, meaning there is a slight lag booting through the add on chip controller. Probably can only be noticed by monitoring equipment not the perceptible eye. I'm not sure if you can even get an SSD that reads or writes at the 750MB/s speed yet so you won't notice if it's not. You can only raid the onboard sata 6 Gb/s or the add on chip, not both together anyway so use the onboard chip for booting and if you want a raid array for the other controller you can do that for storing data safely.

 

[greenhawk]

anyone know if such add-on storage controller is a true SATA3 utilizing at least 4-pci-lanes (1000MB/s theoritical / ~750MB/s actual)?

also, is there a lag during boot up from secondary controller? vs the P55 chipset?

to the first, you would need to read through the manual for the motherboard. Most current manuals include that sort of information so it should not be too hard to find out.

On the second point, generally yes, but that is the same with any addon / extra controller as it will need to initilize on startup, and this takes longer when it has attached drives to it. How long that extra time will be is hard to say, but if you were interested, anything over a second is probably longer than you would be wanting.

 

[Zorander]

I don't know if it matters to you but, if your board is anything like my P55-based ASUS, enabling those add-on controllers results in the primary PCI-e slot running at a maximum 4X.

I personally noticed no difference between the SATA3 Marvell port and the SATA2 Intel ports so I disable the add-on controllers and have the full 16X speed on my primary PCI-e slot.