Quote Originally Posted by donmarkoni View Post
Sorry that I didn't mention it right away, but what is your PCI-E speed when you're trying to go over 221?
I had best results if keep PCI-E speed half of the BCLK.
I think this is board dependant. I can get to 221BCLK without changing PCI-E speed. I can get 232BCLK with 104 PCI-E.

Quote Originally Posted by donmarkoni View Post
Hmm... Strange... As you said, there must be something more. I wouldn't be satisfied with the answer: one PCI-E lane is to blame.
If there was any other way to test...
I think I found one: Buy ASRock SATA3 Card for 25-30$ (sorry for saying so directly: go and spend money ). It is PCI-E x1 SATA3 controller with Marvell 88SE9123 / 88SE9120 chipset. Similar chipset, still one lane used, but different aproach.
Maybe you get more conclusive results.
I agree with this also. The PCI-E lane itself is NOT the limiting factor. The controller itself just sucks. The way around it is use two drives in raid0. Neither drive performs at 'full' speed, but the overall reads and writes are still just as fast, or faster than any sata6 ssd.

My two 80gb x25-m g2's outperform a vertex3 in every possible category except sequential write speed. The marvell has no problem saturating my ssd's write speed at 140mb/sec, and gets ~450mb/sec-470mb/sec read speed.

Overall, I think the complaining about the marvell's performance is just nitpicking. Sure it doesn't give you the best possible performance, but it's still very good performance.