1366 with SATA2 connectors only. Samsung Evo coming. Need a bootable SATA3 card?

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ScYcS

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To make a long story short: I have a 1366 board with SATA2 connectors only. I now have a Samsung Evo drive on it's way, which can sustain some pretty high transfer rates.

Would i benefit from a bootable SATA3 card to make the most of my new drive or is the SATA2 connector on my Asus mobo sufficient?

If new card, which simple, cheap card would you recommend?
 
Probably not. Lower latency from the on chip sata will probably be worth more than the higher throughput of a sata3 card. That said, do you expect 300MB/s to be a bottle neck?
 
No, not really a bottleneck, it's just that i hate buying something that i can't take full advantage of. Similar to buying a $600 videocard and your processor keeps your FPS at 40....
 
You should try a pci express 3 card in a pci express 2 slot. Still works a treat ;)
 
ScYcS said:
No, not really a bottleneck, it's just that i hate buying something that i can't take full advantage of. Similar to buying a $600 videocard and your processor keeps your FPS at 40....
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You won't be able to take "full advantage" of it anyway. Pretty much all PCIe cards will limit your SATA3 speeds to something like 400MB/s or so, instead of the 500-550MB/s you should be getting from these SSD drives.

In short - it is pointless waste of money to buy a SATA3 card for a 1366 system, or to use the Marvell SATA3 ports if you have them on board.
 
I use Crucial M4 on my sata2-only 775 system, and I'm not regretting it :)
It's definitely faster than any HDD, and I can't notice any real difference between the ssd in my rig and the ssd in my brother's (sata3).
 
Would i benefit from a bootable SATA3 card to make the most of my new drive or is the SATA2 connector on my Asus mobo sufficient?
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The answer is most likely no. Most SATA III cards (unless you spend $400+ to get an SSD optimized card) will actually decrease your performance slightly (higher latency with lower IOPS = slightly worse 4K performance) in most real world applications including games. SATA III will increase performance in benchmarks that measure large sequential reads and writes however most real world applications do not read or write GB files sequentially.
 
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If you've got an X8 or longer slot free, one of those rebranded LSI 2008 cards like the IBM M1015 or Dell H200 is pretty nice to have. Probably extreme overkill for a single SSD, but not terribly expensive.

As has already been noted, though, SATA 2 is fine.
 
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