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Battle of the SATA 3.0 Controllers
Deathspawner writes "Think that all SATA 3.0 (6Gb/s) controllers are alike? As Techgage explores, that's not the case. While most SATA 3.0 controllers do deliver the performance promised, the most popular offering on the market does not — at least where bandwidth-busting SSDs are concerned. The controller comes from Marvell, and was bundled on all motherboards prior to AMD and Intel launching their own SATA 3.0 solutions. In some cases, Marvell's controller is half as fast as the others, making it no better than a SATA 2.0 controller. For those with motherboards using a Marvell controller, the solutions are few; build a new PC, or invest in a super-expensive add-in card."
Can anyone say, "class action lawsuit"? It might not work, but if it's actually promising the performance of the spec and doesn't deliver that seems actionable to me (a legal lay person).
Ever since they got bought by Disney, Marvell's disk controllers were never the same.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I initially tried the Marvell controller on my Gigabyte X58 board for a new Agility 3. It was barely getting 230MB/s reads, and it was capped. It eventually failed to detect the drive, so I tried the Intel SATA 2 controller instead. Not only did the drive detect, but I now get ~250MB/s reads (faster random too I've read). I should've known that the company notorious for their freezing SSD controllers would do no better with the SATA controllers.
This happens all the time with computers, but especially with drive controllers it seems. The guy who rushes his half baked solution to market first at the lowest price ends up with millions of copies in nearly every computer in the world. Then a couple of years later when people start really using them, they discover that in fact the chip is full of bugs and slow and corrupts your data. It happened with the CMD 640 back when IDE first came out, the SiI 3112 when SATA first came out, and now it's happening against with SATA2. Most early Firewire controllers were total crap too, and the cheap ones still are.
The worst part is that nearly every peripheral card manufacturer is going to use that same chip because it's the cheapest. So even if you try to get around a buggy chip on your motherboard by buying a PCIe card, you'll just end up with a second copy of that broken chip. It's infuriating and I don't expect the situation to change anytime soon. That is why I always wait when a new storage access standard comes out, it's just a solid bet that the first generation chips will be way more trouble than they're worth.
I read the internet for the articles.
Don't be at the front of the technology curve when buying stuff. Let the other guy take the brunt of it all (thank you other guy for testing these things for the rest of us).
I farted and it smelled a bit like vanilla bean extract.
I learned more from that fart than I did from this submission.
Marvell produces bargain chipsets. They work, and that's about it.
If you want performance you get a dedicated part, or at least the standard Intel chip.
Replace MOBO is not a solution? Oh Noes $50 dollars!
\ What piece of shit motherboards are you buying? My last ASUS mobo was like $289 from Newegg....
Virtually everything JMicron has ever released should probably be mentioned here as well. Those guys really know how to crank up the quality...
Yep, it's very important for a mobo to have sata3, for example. Oh, wait...
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
I was going to say, the motherboard should be the 2nd most expensive component in your typical computer. $50 one is seriously cutting a corner in a way to make almost everything else you buy work at half efficiency. If the mobo isn't close to the price of your CPU, you either A. are running a system that was purely designed to be a cheap piece of crap to handle basic things and you don't really have a reason to care if you are running SATA 3 or plain old fashioned IDE. Or B. you are running a high end system, that runs at the pace of a low/mid end system. a $500 graphics card and a $500 CPU, assuming they even are compatible with a piece of crap $50 board, will likely be slowed down to the speed of a $100 CPU and card.
and guess what, yours is not 5+ times faster than his. It does have sata3, but ...
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Don't buy anything. What the hell do you need SATA 3.0 for? Your single SSD won't be that fast after you've used it a while. As usual, wait six months or a year and there will be much better hardware out there. Don't waste your money now.
If you always wait for the next big thing, you will wait forever. Sometimes you gotta pull the trigger. Personally if I'm comparing two boards equal in all things except SATA 2 versus SATA 3, unless research indicated it was a bad idea, I'd probably go for the more modern variant.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Does the quality on a JMicron chip go to 11?
It was the first controller on the market. It's got two ports each rated for 6Gbit/sec and it's connected via a single PCI-E x1 lane that's theoretical maximum is 5Gbit/sec.
Nobody should have been surprised by this at all. The information was readily available.
Basically, it's suitable for a single device that's sata6, and won't outperform the sata3 controller in some areas.
The device was only meant as a stop gap for bleeding edge users to get the capability.
Only when the expected behavior involves going to some other value...
Go look at what you get for $50 in the way of a motherboard on Newegg right now. I assure you, it's going to be a horrible piece of crap, useless for 90% of applications and builds.
I mean, what the hell, is it a P4 mobo or something we're talking about here? Or something made post-2005?
Marvell can be hit or miss sometimes. I remember the issues I had when I built a system for someone that had a 10/1000 ethernet controller built in. I can actually think of a few reasons why the numbers are lower. First of course is the obvious marevell has been sending out the previous generation of chips to manufactures simply to clear old stock. Most people won't notice a difference anyway. If you're already on a SSD, would you really notice a 150mb/s bump? Prolly not. Then again it could simply be a case of a human screw-up, and sending the wrong controller chips out. Another possibility is resilks, and a mishmash of illegal knockoffs.
I'd take the human screwing up and sending out the wrong chips, unless there's some actual proof that this was an order down on high. Or that some company is getting screwed on resilks and knockoffs.
Om, nomnomnom...
I got a vertex 3 ssd (500MB/s read/write) drive a week or so ago. This was after I discovered that my motherboard (Asus P6X58D-E) had a SATA3 controller and I though I could actually use the performance. After I got the drive I did quite a bit of performance tests and discover that the Marvel controller they used is indeed slow. At 4kb the drive does 75MB/s write and 82MB/s read. It peaks at 218MB/s write and 304MB/s read. I switched over to the SATA2 Intel controller instead and at 4kb I got 152MB/s write and 146MB/s read. While it peaks at 271MB/s write and 283MB/s read. There is some drivers at Station-Drivers that are a lot newer than the latest that Asus has but from reading around it might or might not work to flash the inbuilt controller using them. There is also no clear benchmark of what any potential gains would be. For now I have stayed away from them.
Just because you aren't saturating the connection doesn't mean 3.0 isn't worth it. I have a Crucial M4, it'll read up to 415MB/s SATA 2.0 maxes out at 300MB/s; so unless we are talking about a 25% reduction in speed...
Please, regale us with the powerhouse motherboards you buy for $50. I would really like to see some specs on them...because I highly fucking doubt the only difference is a couple sata3 connections.
No it isn't. It isn't any more durable and isn't any more resistant to becoming obsolete.
This is just another case of confusing your personal property with certain body parts.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Unfortunately people, unlike companies, have a body to incarcerate. :(
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
From TFA:
This isn't to say that Marvell isn't at a disadvantage, however. AMD and Intel both have internal buses to take advantage of, so their SATA 3.0 solutions are basically unrestricted. Marvell on the other hand has to make use of a PCIe lane in order to get its bandwidth, which for a 2.0 lane is 500MB/s. After overhead, that number effectively becomes around 400MB/s, which is about where we saw the drive's read speed basically cap at.
That kind of writing makes me question the professionalism of Techgage. My God, what a mess. Is he correct? Should I believe his measurements? I really don't know.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
> For those with motherboards using a Marvell controller, the solutions are few; build a new PC, or invest in a super-expensive add-in card.
$30 to $60 for a Sata 3 controller card on Amazon depending on number of ports and other factors. I haven't built a PC in awhile (I tend to overbuild and then keep them for a long time) but it seems to me that building a new PC isn't *that* cheap, yet.
It's very useful information about the Marvell controller, and I will be watching for that. But the conclusion appears to be hyperbole.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Heck, they're only about GBP10-12 in the UK. They ought to be even cheaper in the US.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Oh fine, $75.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157195
Way to prove you have no idea what you are talking about. Go buy some cheap and expensive mobos, compare them. See how the CPU is the same no matter what board you use so long as they are the same speed connectors and such.
I spent more on my SSD and video card than anything else. Keep telling me my machine is low end while you waste your money.
It's not always the fault of the controllers, it can also be the way they're connected to the system.
These onboard controllers are connected to the system using PCI Express x1 - it's literally just like plugging them into a x1 slot only they're directly on the motherboard. The problem is there are two versions of PCI Express - the older PCI Express 1.0 provides 250 MB/s in each direction, while PCI Express 2.0 provides 500 MB/s in each direction.
AMD motherboards only had PCI Express 2.0 lanes but Intel had a mix of 2.0 lanes and 1.0 lanes - the most common was 32 x 2.0 lanes (for 2 x x16 lanes for graphics cards) and about 6 x 1.0 lanes coming from the southbridge. So motherboards manufacturers had to either use 1 lane from southbridge and get only 250 MB/s in each direction or resort to using some multiplexing chips that take 2 or more lanes and create a x4 path for the controller. More recently, motherboards detect if there is a card on the second pci express x16 and if there's nothing there, they "borrow" a few of those unused lanes to improve the performance of the various controllers integrated on the motherboard.
See this Anandtech article, it explains better than I can explain: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2973/6gbps-sata-performance-amd-890gx-vs-intel-x58-p55/2
But the point is even if the pci express 2.0 is used, there's only 500 MB/s in each direction, SATA 6 gbps means that a maximum of 750 MB/s should be reachable - very few motherboards connect the controllers to more than one 1x lane so even if the controller could reach 750 MB/s, you won't get it.
This is nothing new - remember the gigabit network cards on PCI? The whole PCI system on your computer can do 133 MB/s and a gigabit link can do about 110 MB/s - would you sue anyone if you plug 4 pci cards in your system and can't reach a throughput higher than 133 MB/s ?
Yeah, I was off a little, what can I say I got my last Mobo on sale. Turns out it runs almost $80 now. AM3 board and yes I was including mail in rebate.
The problem is that most of the motherboards that came with this crappy chip were a lot more than $50. Like mine. It has 6 memory slots so I have (and do) have 24 gig of ram. Also, USB3, eSATA, and a total of 12 SATA ports. And for some people who actually use this (It is a VM development machine) it is actually needed. So can you give me a $50 motherboard with all that? How about for $100. And I would like to reuse my DDR3 ram, and LGA1366 i950, if it is not too much trouble.
Marvell's controller is half-fast
It gets worse than mere poor performance. Couple NVidia chipsets with Silicon Image SATA and you get corruption.
I use chipset integrated controllers (Intel/AMD) exclusively for SATA and high quality discrete cards for SAS. Even Intel gets this stuff wrong, however. What I don't do is use third party SATA controllers, integrated or otherwise. They always suck. It's a given.
Wait for the standard you want to be integrated into the chipset or be disappointed. The chipset makers put a lot more R&D and validation into their work. That's just how it is.
Does Marvell do anything right ? I know their network interfaces are pretty dodgy, as were their SATA 2.0 kludges.
They know they're a shit company, which is why they rush things to market. Think of all the asian motherboard and add-on manufacturers that are dying to be the first to stick another starburst buzzword on their shiny boxes. Marvell released a shit product a few months before the good ones came out, so they sold millions of chips.
If the manufacturers had any standard of quality, we wouldn't have bottom feeders like Marvell, VIA, Broadcom and friends. Like all other things made in China, it's a race to the bottom. Why should we expect otherwise, when their time is so cheap compared to ours ? If I lose a month's work due to corruption, I'm out a good $5k. If they lose a month's work... well they lost less than the cost of the board.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130593R
1155, MSI, no USB3 nor SATA3, nor overclocking, but apart from that, perfectly serviceable. Meets the needs of, actually would be an upgrade for, *everyone* I know.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
You overspent. Anything over about $150 is just wasteful. That number is opinion to a limited degree, but buying the top-end mobo almost never a good value.
I usually wouldnt go over about $180 for a cpu, and $100 for a mobo, and these days probably not over about $100 for the cpu either.
And how the mobo-maker doesnt actually make the chips on the board, they just put them together with a BIOS.
Theyre sort of like a general contractor, what matters is who the real vendors are.
$49.99: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130593R
1155, MSI, GigE, H61 chipset (no overcloking), no USB3 nor sata3. I don't see anything wrong with it, but then again I filled my e-peen requirement years ago.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Hey look, its a $65 motherboard with 4 star rating capable of running an i3!
Whats that, you want to know what happens when the caps blow out after 4 years of use? Why, I go buy another $65 motherboard!
Sure is a strange sense of value folks have, thinking someone should build a rig with a $100 processor and a $100 video card and a $40 hard drive, and then drop $300 on the motherboard.
You must think that rig-building skillz means getting a budget of $1500, buying a bunch of the most expensive crap you can find on newegg, throwing it together, and saying "Sure is fast, I must be a genius or something".
If you know what youre doing, you can get a very performant gaming rig-- windows OS included-- for under $450.
An AM3 board should be findable for $100 that does that. Not going to have 6 slots though, 4 though. I run VMs on servers, 256GB of RAM not a measly 24GB.
is the new super expensive now?
Wow, I must be super rich!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
"If you know what youre doing, you can get a very performant gaming rig-- windows OS included-- for under $450."
HUSH! Those early adopters are subsidizing the rest of us!
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
You paid too much - Take a look at these - http://www.microcenter.com/specials/promotions/AMDbundlePROMO.html I build machine in my spare time and sell on craigslist and people wonder how come you sell a quad core for 350 with 8 GB and 1 TB hard drive. I make an average of $50 per sale.
No Sig for you.!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124046&nm_mc=OTC-Froogle&cm_mmc=OTC-Froogle-_-Hard+Drive+Controllers+/+RAID+Cards-_-Syba-_-16124046
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Well it is open box and there's only D-Sub for the video instead of DVI or HDMI. Otherwise it's a good mobo. I think for $20 more you can get DVI.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Just purchased an ASUS P8P67 motherboard for a brand new Core i7 2600k install; my first new PC in like 5 years. I chose the P8P67 because it had a good assortment of SATA 3 and USB 3 ports for expansion. I had a DVD burner and 3 SATA drives to put into it; I like lots of storage.
I hooked up the drives, putting my brand new WD Caviar Black 1TB SATA 3 hard drive in the first SATA 3 port, and started installing Windows 7. It seemed to take a long time. The installation finished and I started installing all the usual utilities, apps, and games that one has to install on a new PC. I noticed that my system kept pausing, however. I would try to install something, and I would get frequent hourglass pauses, and sometimes the system would seem to lock up for up to 20 seconds at a time.
Eventually, I looked into the system log and saw that there were a bunch of errors coming up every time this happened; disk unavailable, and a driver name. The driver was for the Marvell SATA controller.
I moved that drive to one of the Intel SATA 3 ports (the other drives were not on the Marvell ports) and I have had no problems of that nature in the three weeks since then.
So, basically two of my SATA 3 ports, one of the primary reasons I chose this motherboard, are of no use to me.
Oh, funny fact; my older system had an ASUS P5N SLI motherboard. Marvell SATA chipset. My and I had both problems with that controller too (identical systems.)
I think it's a typo, the non-open box version is listed with DVI. I don't mind open box, it's actually tested by tech support, whereas regular mobos pass through untested and can be DOA.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
the SiI 3112 when SATA first came out,
WHY WHY DID YOU BRING THAT UP!!! I thought I wiped that bit of my life from my memory. It was traumatic. I still have sleepless nights watching my computer randomly not recognise my 2TB array, and watching the default Linux kernel driver for that POS kernel panic for no reason.
I remember having actual sleepless nights getting that piece of shit to work too. I remember having to install Linux on another drive, then compiling in the appropriate drivers, then using that linux to install linux to my other drives, then chrooting into that new linux to fix things so it wouldn't panic either. (In retrospect there may have been a better way but I was rather new to it at the time).
Companies do to, but unlike people, when the suggestion of incarcerating a company comes up, too many people start complaining that there are innocent people relying on them.
A newegg "open box" motherboard means that a different customer sent it back and they are now using you as "tech support"
"His name was James Damore."
Generally speaking if you want SATA-III to operate satisfactorily you need to use the AHCI controller built into the cpu chipset bundle. That is, the one that Intel and AMD bundle. That will get you a reliable 32-tag-per-port controller. You definitely do not want to use an external controller or a third-party chipset controller (aka Marvell), at least not if you can help it. You won't have a choice if you want hardware RAID, AMD and Intel's controllers don't do RAID (BIOS-based fakeraid doesn't count).
All chipsets have bugs, even AMD and Intel chipsets. Intel AHCI controllers have problems probing Intel SSDs (go figure) and require a driver workaround to unbrick the port when the problem occurs during probe. AMD chipsets don't mask phy errors during initial training, which creates a lot of superfluous interrupts. Both controllers play fast and loose with the AHCI spec and the AHCI spec itself is pretty badly designed, with tons of issues (though not as badly designed as the immensely idiotic USB HCIs).
Another big problem is that the firmware controller that runs the chipset side of the AHCI is typically responsible for ALL the SATA ports, which means that hotplug on one port can actually interfere with operations on another. It pisses me off, but there's no avoiding it.
The external chipsets are even worse. Marvell is a joke. Silicon Image chipsets are full of HARDWARE bugs (not just firmware bugs) which require a lot of workarounds in driver code (for example, you can't abort a soft-reset sequence reliably on a SIL chipset and you can't access the on-chip shared memory while commands are in progress without corrupting any DMA that happens to be occuring).
The stuff is getting better, slowly. The manufacturers of these chipsets have traditionally not really cared about these sorts of bugs because 99.9% of their users are consumers who don't care. The remaining 0.1% professionals who do care aren't a big enough crowd to make the manufacturers actually fix their firmware.
SATA at least has the AHCI spec, too bad more chip manufacturers don't use it. If you want to talk wireless and ethernet chipsets matters are far, far worse.
-Matt (who wrote and maintains DragonFly's AHCI driver)
Whats that, you want to know what happens when the caps blow out after 4 years of use? Why, I go buy another $65 motherboard!
Yes, but what happens to the old motherboard after that? So you now have two motherboards in a period when you only needed one (unless you were planning on upgrading at that time anyway). Unless the caps can be easily replaced (not always the case) you won't be able to donate it to a school or youth centre and have just created more unnecessary toxic waste.
Where possible, please try to buy right the first time.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
You send it to a recycling center. Apple will take care of it for free, i believe. And replacing a mobo every 4 years really isnt that bad, nor do I think it to be the "average case" with $65 mobos. You can get mobos @ $65 that have NO capacitor issues whatsoever, thats just about the only big issue you MIGHT run into with a cheap unit (other than insufficient cooling, which is easy to fix).
And asking me to pay 4x as much on some theory that "more expensive means more reliable" despite no real evidence to that is a little bit much. Sometimes they just go with a value package of 1-generation older chipsets etc, which really just means that you have "tried and true" parts with all the errata known.
So once you add the new CPU, (Can't fit an i905 into an AMD motherboard) and the more expensive memory to have it at least 24 gig, it is well more than 10 times that $50. And it is a development workstation. VMs at will with no change management, unlike the VM server.
If you're throwing modern PCs out after 4 years, you're a fool.
Anything introduces in the past 4 years is likely to be dual-core and capable of fitting 4GB of RAM. Put a modern OS on that and you have something that will work just fine for regular users for another 4-6 years if no parts die.
We priced out a new Thinkpad T series this week and compared it to what I already have:
- 8GB RAM (my 4-year old T61p has 4GB and can fit 8GB RAM), sure it might be DDR3 instead of DDR2 but that doesn't get you a whole lot of speed.
- 2.5GHz dual-core i3 vs my 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo. A generous estimate is that the i3 is about 25% faster per clock cycle, which means a performance increase of about 40% faster. A quad-core Intel CPU would tip the balance, but not many folks are CPU-constrained any longer once you get dual-core.
- A newer GPU (that's actually worth something - but it's still a GPU crammed into a laptop, so it's not going to be as fast as my year-old GTX 460).
- Win7 vs WinXP, tempting, but I could also just put Win7 on my existing Thinkpad.
- 128GB SSD for +$320, but I already have a 256GB SSD installed.
Computers (barring going to quad/hex cores) are not getting that much faster year after year. The years of 50-80% faster every year are long gone. We're now only seeing 10-20% per-core performance increase every year, with the rest of the improvements coming from increasing the number of cores. But after you get 4-6 cores in your machine, then what? Odds are that you're now struggling to keep even 2 cores busy all the time.
So that 4-year old Thinkpad is still running strong and will probably last another 2-3 years before it gets retired. And if I do the 8GB upgrade and put Win7 on it, it may go another 3-4 years.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
$450 would be pushing it for a gaming rig.
A good case and power supply is going to run you about $80+$70 (figure $150 total). A good case can easily last you through multiple upgrade cycles and a good PSU keeps everything else inside safe. (A good filtering UPS helps too, but a cheap PSU is just asking for trouble.)
CPU $100, MB $80, RAM $50, DVD $20. That's about $250 for the basics. Plus another $75 for a regular HD which takes us up to $325 for the internals.
A "decent" video card tends to be in the $75 range as a starting point. Cheaper then that and you're bottom of the barrel and going up to $125-$150 is not a bad idea if you truly care about performance.
Then you have to deal with the operating system license, which is $50-$150 depending on what version of Win7 you want and whether you can qualify for the OEM price. The Win7 Pro retail version is $250.
I wouldn't try to build a "gaming" PC for less then about $550-$600. When you start getting lower then that you're really cutting a lot of corners just to hit some magical price point. And going up to about $750 gets you a heck of a lot of power for not much more money (8GB, quad-core CPU, $150 video card).
Now, if you're going absolutely barebones then you can probably get down around $500.
And you can go higher, but I think that puts you out past the "knee" in the bang for the buck graph. (Four years ago, the magic numbers were $900-$1200, so things have come down a bit in price.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
If you're throwing modern PCs out after 4 years, you're a fool.
Er, Im not. I was specifically saying "if the motherboard dies after 4 years because it was only $65, you recycle it and get a new one".
I certainly dont think it makes sense to spend $1300 to get top end parts to try to squeeze 8-9 years out of it rather than just getting a $450 pc and hoping for 6-7.
to be clear, the "it" in "recycle it" is the motherboard.
Trusting a typical performance benchmark is like trusting now many pounds you can bench as a measure of overall health. Yes, benchmarks do provide some information about the relative performance of products, but it's by no means a complete picture!
When you are evaluating performance of a system, it's important to consider all aspects of system performance, and not get too hung up on any single factor.
Recently, we did a server upgrade to using SSDs in our database servers. The performance difference was dramatic, though in benchmark testing, we saw very little performance difference between 1.5 Gbps SATA interfaces and 6 Gbps SATA III interfaces for hosting production databases. We saw something like a 90% drop in system load! This indicates that the biggest benefit of SSDs was in reduced seek time, not transfer rate, and that for our needs, transfer speeds weren't a bottle neck in any event, but that the sharply reduced seek times provided a huge benefit.
Know what you need, and you be much more likely to get it!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Also, The Marvell shit controllers, 912x at least, don't pass TRIM commands. It's been proven many times.
Change management on a dev server?
Your job sucks.
Shittiest motherboard I ever had the misfortune of dealing with was an Asrock. It was my first computer and nothing worked right. I replaced the POS with an ASUS motherboard and overnight everything worked great. Moral of the story: Only a total noob would recommend Asrock to anyone they didn't hate.
Production servers, and development workstations. Works for me. :) Why spend the $5000-10000 for high availability and high speed drive arrays for development, when a $1500 workstation will do it just as well?
No one said anything about high availability, and if you want to dev on slow drives have fun.
Go buy a bunch of $50 motherboards and a bunch of $150 motherboards. Now wait 5 years of them running 24/7 and see which ones have the fewest problems. One pays for quality. Go purchase a $25 800watt PSU and load test it, let me know how that goes and tell me quality doesn't matter.
Last time I purchased a $50 mobo, was because I was 13 years old and mowed lawns for money.
I expect all hardware I own to run 24/7, not until it dies, but until I no longer have use for it. If my mobo dies when I'm relying on it to work, then it was bad.
"Look, I found this car for $1000 cheaper. The head gasket goes bad every 4 years, but I still save money in the long run."
Yeah, if you don't value your time.