Just received the OCZ Vertex 32GB drive I ordered.

First thing to do was to see whether it is as fast as advertised.

What I'm seeing is that the read speed greatly depends on the SATA controller. I tested on three different PC's using this command:

dd if=/dev/sdX of=/dev/null bs=1024k count=8192

(I made sure to flush the cache by first dd'ing another drive)

Results:
ICH7, ahci: 78 MB/s
ICH7, ata_piix: 125 MB/s
ICH8, ahci: 78 MB/s
ICH8, ata_piix: 132 MB/s
ICH10, ahci: 78 MB/s
ICH10, ata_piix: 187 MB/s
sil3132, ahci: 72 MB,s
Marvell 88SE6121, pata_marvell: 138 MB/s

Interesting to see is how bad AHCI performs. Wasn't AHCI supposed to be "superior"?

For regular SATA drives, AHCI versus IDE mode does not seem to matter, at least for sequential read speeds, but choosing IDE mode would disable NCQ. Would that slow down regular SATA drives?

Thanks,
Pim