IDF 2009: The Best Tech From The Show Floor

Marvell Shows off SATA 6G

One of the highly anticipated changes that is coming this fall when it comes to the storage market would be SATA 6GB/s! Marvell had the ASUS P7P55D motherboard on display and it just happens to be the World’s first SATA 6GB/s ready motherboard. This is because the board uses Marvell’s 88SE9128 controller, which is the industry’s first 6Gb/s SATA RAID controller. Marvell is also working with other motherboard manufacturers such as ASRock, Gigabyte and MSI to bring out more SATA 6Gb/s ready devices.

Marvell also had some Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 drives on display that support SATA 6GB/s.

Marvell allowed us to fire up HD Tach 3.0.4 and showed us that the burst speed of the drive was 298.1MB/s! It seems that on single hard disk drives like this the main performance benefit of SATA 6Gb/s will be the burst speed as the average read was 108.6MB/s with a random access time of 13.5ms.

Marvell also had one of their own 2.5″ SSDs on display that was SATA 6GB/s ready!

Curious about SSD performance on a SATA 6Gb/s ready motherboard? As you can see in the screenshot above the drive had a 352.5MB/s burst speed, 297.6MB/s average read and a random access time of 0.2ms. This is very impressive and the ASUS P7P55D motherboard should be a very affordable motherboard aimed at the mainstream market for around $149.99.