Venerable Intel G2 SSDs To Be Discontinued.

[idata]

It seems the clock is ticking down on the Intel X-25 M and V G2 series of SSDs, with the final shipments in Q4 2011. Check it out here:

http://qdms.intel.com/dm/d.aspx/419a34bf-f6e0-4c64-b856-784d90bd00f9/PCN110606-00.pdf http://qdms.intel.com/dm/d.aspx/419a34bf-f6e0-4c64-b856-784d90bd00f9/PCN110606-00.pdf

While time and products march on, I'll always be fond of my G2's, my first SSDs which have served me very well, and still do. I certainly don't see this as a potential issue for G2 owners, as warranty replacements will likely be from the new series if G2's are not available.

[idata]

The controller lives on

[idata]

If so that's good, I've always thought that is one of the G2 SSD's good points. I've read at least one new Intel SSD is using a Marvell controller. I have a slight prejudice against Marvell due to their 91XX SATA chips, or the seemingly poor driver.

Haven't heard much from you lately...

[idata]

This may be a little off topic, but I have read several reviews that said the MB manufacturers limited the lanes of traffic to the Marvel controllers to give them to the pcie slots. That is why Marvel controllers don't have the performance.

[idata]

Relic, What you wrote is basically true, one PCI-E lane is used for the various Marvel 91XX SATA controllers by all mother board manufactures, so it is immediately limited to one PCI-E lane's bandwidth, of 5Gb/s, short of the SATA 6Gb/s maximum theoretical rate. Not that any single HDD or SSD that exists today can even perform at the more reasonable 600MB/s actual bandwidth quoted for the SATA 6GB/s interface anyway.

The one catch is that Marvell advertises their products for use with one PCI-E 2.0 lane. From Marvell's website:

• 88SE9128 (PCIe ×1 to 2 SATA 6 Gb/s ports RAID controller)
• 88SE9125/88SE9120 (PCIe×1 to 2 SATA 6Gb/s ports I/O controller)

See for yourself:

http://www.marvell.com/products/storage/storage_system_solutions/sata_controllers_pc_consumer/ http://www.marvell.com/products/storage/storage_system_solutions/sata_controllers_pc_consumer/

Whether or not the chips themselves are limited to one PCI-E lane, I do not know, or if they can be implemented with multiple PCI-E lanes, but no one does AFAIK.

But all of this was not my point. The problem with the Marvell SATA 6Gb/s interface is it's poor "user experience", ie 'drives not being recognized by the BIOS or OS when connected, 'drives "disappearing" from the OS randomly, RAID configurations failing or failing to configure correctly, and the data transfer rate falling off drastically over time when the interface is used for long intervals. Those are the most common complaints regarding the Marvell SATA chipsets seen in forums, such as this one or in any mother board manufacture's forum. Those problems seem to be associated with the drivers that Marvell provides, as well as the lack of documentation for their products. Intel provides the only Marvell documentation I have ever seen, that being one five year old document. Nothing is available from Marvell's website that is of any use to the end user. IMO in some cases the problems with the Marvell interfaces is due to user ignorance and error, which is exacerbated by the lack of documentation, but certainly not all of it.

On the other hand, reviews of mother boards using the Marvel SATA interface chips don't complain about them at all as far as I have seen. Prior to the release of the Intel 6 series chipsets, the Marvell SATA 6Gb/s chips were among the best performing interfaces according to several reviews I have seen. Also, Marvell has recently released a new AHCI driver (Beta version) for their chipsets that functions much better according to users and in my personal experience.