Want to put a Current-Gen Sata III on a really old mobo, will this plan work?

[blackjackel]

Ok, so I'm still on my Q6600 on my p5k deluxe, it has two PCI express x16 slots. I'm planning to get a SATA III pci express 4x card and even though my mobo has pci express 1.0 at 250mb/s max per channel, since I'm running 4x I shoul be able to run a current gen sata III drive at max speed, right?

PCI express is version 1.0, so a x1 pci card has a maximum 250Mb/s per channel according to wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=PCI_Express

I'm thinking of buying this pci express 4x card listed here:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115114

According to theoretical pci express 1 speeds, at 250mb per channel, at 4 channels (cause the card is 4x) i should have a maximum of 1GBPS.

So I should be able to run the fastest consumer SATA III drive on the market without problems, right? for example, say this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-2-5-I...=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B00BQ8RGL6

 

[Silver_Pharaoh]

In theory as it seems yeah.

 

[EarthDog]

Yep..

BUT, and someone needs to correct me on this I bet, I am not sure if that board can boot from PCIe, or on the other side, if it even needs to as the card may do that. I just recall that some boards couldn't boot off PCIe... but I may be way off...

 

[Lady Fitzgerald]

You would be better off just using one of the SATA II (3Gbps) ports to run your SSD from and forget about the RAID card. As EarthDog said, not all RAID cards can be booted from. Even if the one you are looking at can be booted from, your boot speeds won't increase and may even be reduced because the card will have to boot its own BIOS in addition to the MOBO BIOS. Even running off a SATA II port, the SSD will still run circles around any HDD

 

[ATMINSIDE]

Drop the RAID card and get an 840 EVO 1TB.

 

[wagex]

as long as it is a decent LSI raid card you should have no issues booting to it... and it should pull the full 6GB/s from sata III
they can be pricey though.

if he were to drop the raid card he would be stuck at sata II 3GB/s

though if you are going to spend that much on a raid card you can increase the overall performance a metric poopton do a mobo/cpu/ram upgrade and it will have 6GB/s capabilities, it will cost a bit more but you arent throwing money at old tech.

 

[ATMINSIDE]

as long as it is a decent LSI raid card you should have no issues booting to it... and it should pull the full 6GB/s from sata III
they can be pricey though.

if he were to drop the raid card he would be stuck at sata II 3GB/s

Biggest advantage of an SSD is the 4K read improvement and the access time improvement from a typical HDD, in a daily OS usage situation.

He'll still see a HUGE difference from a platter on his onboard controller.

 

[Silver_Pharaoh]

Drop the RAID card and get an 840 EVO 1TB.

as long as it is a decent LSI raid card you should have no issues booting to it... and it should pull the full 6GB/s from sata III
they can be pricey though.

if he were to drop the raid card he would be stuck at sata II 3GB/s

though if you are going to spend that much on a raid card you can increase the overall performance a metric poopton do a mobo/cpu/ram upgrade and it will have 6GB/s capabilities, it will cost a bit more but you arent throwing money at old tech.

Would the combined above not be the best option?

AFAIK the EVO is faster than SATA II, so not having that SATA III Pci card would mean you are leaving some of the EVO's speed left behind.

 

[EarthDog]

It's booting from pcie that I think is the concern. Some boards support it, others don't. Not sure if the raid card in itself resolves that issue or not. Pcie ssd's have that issue... Not sure about raid cards though.

+1 to ladyf.

 

[ATMINSIDE]

Would the combined above not be the best option?

AFAIK the EVO is faster than SATA II, so not having that SATA III Pci card would mean you are leaving some of the EVO's speed left behind.

The only thing that saturates the connection is the sequential read/write.
And let's be honest, how often is copying a file larger than 500MB from your OS drive going to happen?

SATA II still gets the benefits of the 4K read being much faster, and of the access time being much lower.
Less hassle of RAID card compatibility with your motherboard, issues booting to it, and issues installing drivers for it during a Windows install.

 

[blackjackel]

I should report that based on one review on amazon, the card is actually 2 lane, not 4 lane...

Meaning the theoretical maximum speed is 500mbps and not more, meaning i can't utilize the drive's max 540mbps speeds :/

 

[Silver_Pharaoh]

I should report that based on one review on amazon, the card is actually 2 lane, not 4 lane...

Meaning the theoretical maximum speed is 500mbps and not more, meaning i can't utilize the drive's max 540mbps speeds :/

The only thing that saturates the connection is the sequential read/write.
And let's be honest, how often is copying a file larger than 500MB from your OS drive going to happen?

SATA II still gets the benefits of the 4K read being much faster, and of the access time being much lower.
Less hassle of RAID card compatibility with your motherboard, issues booting to it, and issues installing drivers for it during a Windows install.

^^
ATM knows what's good

 

[ATMINSIDE]

meaning i can't utilize the drive's max 540mbps speeds :/

Those speeds only happen under sequential transfers of large files.
Get it out of your head, that's not the part of the SSD that matters for daily OS performance.