PCIe SATA III Controller Card Recommendation

S

Stugots

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Feb 25, 2004
Messages
7,257
I recently bought an SSD for the system in my signature. The SSD is capable of SATA3, but my motherboard only supports SATA2. I am easily hitting the limit of SATA2, and I was thinking about adding a SATA3 controller.

The problem is, my motherboard only has PCIe 1.1, so a typical PCIe 1x SATA3 card will probably be slower than running the onboard SATA2 controller (250MB/s vs 300MB/s). So I think my only option is to get a PCIe 4x card. I haven't had much luck in finding a card to suit my needs.

I'm looking for recommendations on what card if any that I could get. Or confirmation that I'm stuck with what I have.
 
My recommendation is use the SSD on the SATA II controller you have or buy a totally new system with a builtin SATA III controller. In most cases (outside of benchmarks) you will not notice the difference between SATA II and SATA III anyways (since most applications do not read or write large files sequentially or read / write with a high queue depth) so I recommend to keep what you have.
 
Get yourself a LSI raid card. Try to find a IBM M5015 on ebay for cheap. Well worth the money.
 
drescherjm said:
My recommendation is use the SSD on the SATA II controller you have or buy a totally new system with a builtin SATA III controller. In most cases (outside of benchmarks) you will not notice the difference between SATA II and SATA III anyways (since most applications do not read or write large files sequentially or read / write with a high queue depth) so I recommend to keep what you have.
Click to expand...

Thanks, that's kind of what I was expecting to hear. I didn't want to spend more that $50-$60 for a controller.
 
Really spend the money if you're going to get a third party controller card. The cheap SATA III cards will likely perform on par or worse than your onboard SATA II, so it's not really worth it unless you have the money to blow on a real nice card.
 
You could get a Bri10 off ebay for $40 if you dont need more >2tb support.

Its an LSI chip and can be flashed to IT mode if need be.
 
All those suggesting a cheap card are wrong. Even the quality ones aren't suited for SSDs. SSDs are all about response time, and these cards will slow down your SSD. The only way to go for third party cards is LSI 9260/9265 with fastpath, and that is an expensive proposition, not worth it for only one SSD.
 
Thanks for the responses. I'm just going to stick with the onboard SATA2 controller for now.
 
Why are you still running a 5160 :eek:

No HT
Dual Core
Sucks down power

Even the cheeeeeeep CPUs of today are more powerful ;)
 
ToddW2 said:
Why are you still running a 5160 :eek:

No HT
Dual Core
Sucks down power

Even the cheeeeeeep CPUs of today are more powerful ;)
Click to expand...

Because I have more important things to spend money on than a faster computer. And because the only other processor that may give an advantage is the Xeon E5345, which has more slower cores so I think the faster dual cores would be better suited for me.

I'm well aware that an i5 or i3 will run circles around this system.

This system is still plenty fast for me. Up until a few months ago, I was running a Pentium D 3.4ghz without any complaints.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top