I was just reading a system guide from one of my most favorite websites, and I was honestly surprised about the idea of USB 3.0 and SATA 6.0 Gb/s interfaces dictating whether a product was good enough to make the grade. In particular, we're talking about Gigabyte boards here with the NEC SuperSpeed USB 3.0 and Marvell SE9128 high speed SATA3 chips. We also have Asus promising "True USB 3.0" speeds on their boards by using second-generation PCI-Express lanes instead of first-generation ones. This whole thing reeks to me.

I am thrown back to a system I built a friend back in the Athlon XP days. We had a little extra cash in the budget, and decided to go with a brand-spanking new Western Digital Raptor 36GB hard drive to speed up his boot times and application load times. The downside was that Raptors only shipped with SATA interfaces, a brand new thing on the market. At this time you couldn't get an NVIDIA chipset with native SATA, so it was either a stinky Pentium 4 or a VIA motherboard for the brand-new, rocket-fast Athlon 2500+ Barton.

That machine had a standard chipset with an additional VIA SATA chip thrown on the side, much like what we're seeing with these Marvel solutions. Needless to say, performance was good, in fact much better than anything else out there, but we wouldn't know what those drives were really capable of until the NVIDIA chipests launched later. This was not only due to bottlenecks in the PCI bus, like what Asus is trying to eliminate with their "True" solutions, but also due to piss-poor driver support and a very lackluster chip all together. In fact, his system would have to be rebuilt about 3 times since the VIA driver would prematurely power down the drive on shutdown, leaving unwritten data in the cache.

What I'm trying to get at is that the first generation of these technologies usually ends up pretty rough. We won't see native USB 3 support in Windows 7 until the service pack drops later this year, and we certainly won't see an OS designed for SATA 6.0 Gb/s speeds until Windows 8. Will you certainly have issues? Of course not. However, in the interest of stability, I always turn off as many extra chips as possible. That goes double for these infantile technologies.