Something many have been looking forward to with the Intel P55 Express chipset and motherboards using it, was the added support for SATA 6Gb/s. The new storage interface offers twice the transfer rates over the current SATA2 (3Gb/s) interface, which in practice should result in around 500-550MB/s. Alas, motherboard makers had to scrap plans when Marvell got problems with its SATA 6Gb/s controller and only a few boards ships with support from factory. ASUS hopes to remedy this with its SATA6G expansion card.
The expansion card use a PCI-Express x4 slot and has its own bridge chip for full PCIe 2.0 bandwidth between processor, SATA 6Gb/s chip and harddrives.
ASUS claims that all Intel P55 motherboards will support he new controller card, and we’re of course glad to hear this. The question is rather how many motherboards that have free PCIe x4 slots. Or bigger of course since you can use small connectors in large ports too.
ASUS has used the updated Marvell 9123 SATA 6Gb/s controller, a PCIe bridge chip with dual SATA 6Gb/s connectors. It has a similar solution integrated onto ASUS P7P55D Premium and the expansion card is expected to appear soon. It also reveals that the first SATA 6Gb/s harddrives are coming in September.
