Quote Originally Posted by Oliverda View Post
So, let's make it clear.

The new SB850 southbridge will natively support the SATA 3 (~SATA 600) standard. There is no need PCI-E lines for it.

The USB 3.0 support can be carry out with external controlles (via PCI-E lanes).
Well, I'd say it isn't important if the SB supports SATA 600 directly or it is done via separate controller, it's just matter of latency. The main thing is that the own SB is connected only by 4 PCIe lines, just named as A-Link Express 3.0, but still 4 PCIe links. Well, if it would really be PCIe gen 2, no problem though.

Otherwise 1GB/s is way too low I think - arround 600 MB/s can be eaten by SATA 600 only (using 3 SATA 600 SSD's no problem reaching this). So two PCIe lanes for USB 3.0 controller, which is going to be connected to SB, am I right? (not mentioning two PCIe 1.x lanes are minimall value for USB 3.0 500 MB/s), can have only 400 MB/s than. It would be a bottleneck, if you imagine a situation moving some stuff from two or three USB 3.0 disks to three RAID 5 SSD's and copying something through 1Gb LAN in the same time. A bit strange situation but can happen.