There's a problem with Marvell's new chips.
We've had SATA as the interface of choice for our HDDs, SSDs and ODDs for the past few years, running through versions 1.0 and 2.0, but the third has a problem.
Each has increased theoretical bandwidth from 150MB/s to 300MB/s, and SATA 3.0 promised to bring us up to 600MB/s speeds - if only the controller chip would work.
The three main mobo players (ASUS, GIGABYTE and MSI) each intended to include Marvell's 88SE9123 controller on their upcoming P55 boards, which would have offered two ports of SATA 3.0 goodness and open up some compatability for when devices actually come out to support the standard.
That decision has been reversed now, and the manufacturers have gone back to the drawing board to pluck the Marvell chip off their designs, citing performance and reliability problems.
We had a look at the ASUS P7P55D EVO motherboard just last week which was to have the chip included, but this and the GIGABYTE P55-UD6 have been reworked to remove the functionality completely, wih GIGABYTE's planned X58 relaunch also affected.
This isn't going to affect the performance of the standard as a whole once the Marvell chips are fixed, but early adopters of P55 boards will be in the same boat as everyone else currently when SATA 3.0 SSDs and the like come out.
An article over at PC Perspective highlights some comments from each mobo manufacturer, but it's not likely we'll see mainstream SATA 3.0 until late 2009, if not 2010.
Issue: 107 | December, 2009