6Gbps SATA Performance: AMD 890GX vs. Intel X58/P55
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 25, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Storage
Write Performance Isn’t Safe Either
Testing read performance is the easiest since I just fill the SSD with data once and can read off it multiple times. To achieve repeatable write performance however I have to secure erase the drive between each test. Not impossible, but annoying given that only certain motherboards allow me to drop the SATA ports into legacy mode which is necessary for the DOS based secure erase application to work. For that reason I’m only providing a small subset of my testbeds here to prove that write speed is also impacted:
Here the results are even more frustrating. Paired with a PCIe 1.0 slot, random write speed is virtually cut in half. The frustration comes from the fact that Intel’s native 3Gbps controller is faster than almost anything else here.
I say almost because we do have one exception. AMD’s 890GX delivers a staggering 180MB/s in random write performance, a full 31% faster than Intel’s X58. The random write speed makes me believe that with a bit of driver and/or BIOS work we can get random read performance up there as well.
Performance in the Real World
These differences are visible in the real world as well. I took four systems and copied a 10GB file from the C300 to itself and measured average write speed:
The real takeaway here is that sticking a 6Gbps controller behind a PCIe 1.0 slot wreaks havoc on performance.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
57 Comments
View All Comments
sparkuss - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
Anand,I was going to maybe get two C300's for my current build. Do we consumers need to wait for your update before we invest in these?
We know it died, but I haven't been able to find any other reliability statistics collated anywhere to make a buying decision on.
sparkuss - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
Sorry, I missed the Update link in the upper corner.vol7ron - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
Great review. Not much to be said. There was a little bit of puffery at the end, in AMDs favor.I'm sure most companies have faster controllers/BIOSs to be released. Rather than saying AMD is something to look out for, for some reason I'd think Intel would have something greater.
As you mentioned, the on-die controller should have lower latencies - could you ask them about this? Perhaps some of the PCI bandwidth is being chewed up by something else, or perhaps the latencies are too low, causing a check/repeat bottleneck? (or maybe this a marketing ploy to release something faster in the future)
Dzban - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
Because AMD has native 6Gbps and they are improving drivers. With intel chipsets you can't phisicly increase speed further.vol7ron - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
I don't like how Intel switches between [Mb/s & Gb/s] and [MB/s & GB/s]. It'd be nicer to not have to translate 480Mbps into 60MB.I guess the issue was at first past I almost equated the 480Mb/s to the 500MB/s right under it.
jejeahdh - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
You should not type dates in that format, and if you had an editor, he or she should absolutely stop you from doing such things. People have expectations. You might think it's no worse than the ever-present traditional ambiguous formats of the US and Europe (m/d/yy(yy), d/m/yy(yy)) which are bad enough, but at least it's an old and well recognized problem that people are used to living with, so long as it uses slashes. People with knowledge of standards, though, use dashes for ISO date format, yyyy-mm-dd which is also perfectly sortable. By mixing and matching styles haphazardly, you're only propagating the notion that anything goes, causing people to stop and wonder for 12 days out of every month. If you're deliberately adopting the style commonly used in the Netherlands (I had to look it up) and advocating its use for an international audience, I cannot imagine why.I know it seems crazy to harp on this and I kind of agree . . . but I am just so surprised to see it here, written by a detail oriented technically minded accomplished writer.
strikeback03 - Friday, March 26, 2010 - link
If this is in response to the IOMeter build, that might be the way it was named by its creator, not Anand. Also, I would imagine 6-22-2008 is m-dd-yyyyassassin37 - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
Hey Anand, Why isn't the X-58 gigabyte native 6gbs board on the write benchmarks?assassin37 - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
never mind I read why, legacy modevailr - Thursday, March 25, 2010 - link
Intel releases SSD friendly AHCI/RAID driver:http://www.pcper.com/#NewsID-8538">http://www.pcper.com/#NewsID-8538