As technology progresses, we are bound to see faster performance at a fraction of the previous generation of devices. SATA3 promoises higher speeds than the previous generation. In SATA2, most people who uses SSD woudl be able to achieve a sustainable red speed of 200MB/s or so. In this article, we will take a look at Marvell's SATA3 performance when paired up with a SATA3 SSD device.

The SATA3 interface is based on Marvell's chipset - Marvell 9123 and a Marvell 6Gb/s SSD. This Marvell chipset can be found on some mainboard implementations and the ASRock P55 Deluxe uses this chipset on it's daughter card with 2 ports +1 eSATA (2 ports active at one time).

The SSD is a not released product and has a product code of SD88SA02. The Storage controller used is the Marvell SATA3 controller chipset. In IO Meter, we can see that the sustainable throughput reaches almost 400MB/s.

Using HD Tach, the same test is done and the results are very encouraging. In both short and long tests, the Burst Speed reaches 358.2MB/s. The average read is around 305.6MB/s. Although the sustained performance is high at 300MB/s, the cpu utilisation seems to be a bit on the high at 8% to 10%. It looks like it takes a while for new drivers to perfect the performance.

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