I have an Asus P6T mobo, and it does not come with sata 3 (6gb/s), as it came out before sata 3 was out or popular.
I have bout and I am expecting a sata 3 ssd, an OCZ VTX4-25SAT3-128G R, which can reach 500 mb/s. Naturally sata 2 cannot reach these speeds, so I was looking for a sata 3 card.
The purpose of the drive would be to become the system drive, with win7 on it. The question becomes, is windows going to have an issue finding the drive, since it would be connected to the sata card? I reckon it would need drivers when installing, that is not a big deal, still prolly an annoyance.
The question becomes: what card to get?
Newegg has a bunch ranging between 20 bucks to 1k+. Naturally I do not need the more expensive SAS cards, but I cannot find any good information on what to pick. There are a few decent cards, with reviews that say they are ok, but they are on the cheap side. For example a Bytecc PCIe card for only $25. The two reviews say 5/5 but I would want more reivews than that. Also the card only has 1 internal, and 1 external. I would rather have 2 internal and no external. I do have a sata 2 ssd that I am also planning on installing for swap for a 1.7 Tb 3hdd mechanical raid 0. Not sure if this is even possible with my mobo, but can give it a go, it's mostly side project.
So any advice on a good sata 3 card that will not crap out?
You wont feel a performance boost from moving to sata 3. Unless you plan on doing a raid set up I wouldnt bother. Buy the Sata 3 SSD, use it on sata 2. When you rebuild move it to the next rig.
Commissar, as my post states, I have done some research, and I was asking other ppl's opinions.
Thanks for the feedback TallGeese. Yet, according to wikipedia the max transfer rate of sata 2 is 300 mb/s while sata 3 is 600 mb/s. The sdd can get to 500 mb/s, since both the ssd and the sata rates are both calculated on max uncoded trasfer rate, at least in theory, the difference is nearly 1/2. I can agree that actual xfer speeds of the drive will be far from 500 mb/s, still there should be a significant difference.
I guess the question is: is it worth the money and trouble to get a card and have the main drive on it, for the performance increase.
Thing is, I will be keeping my current setup for at least another 2 or more years. It's an i7, 6gb ram, gtx 470, so it's going to be good for a while.
Alright you say PCI at the start and PCIe later on, what are we dealing with?
Cards may or may not be able to be used as a direct boot drive depending on drivers (you can work around this with another drive and partition)
Yes you will notice the speed difference, a decent SSD will max out Sata 2.
Also the drastic price difference is going to be how the card deals with the data, if it does processing on card that's where the big dollar ones are while the dirt cheap ones just offload to you cpu.
Hey Scraps, I have one of each (PCI and PCIe) slots open, so either one works, naturally would want to go with the one that gives me the best performance if price difference is not significant. Thanks for the info on why price variates so much from one card to the next.
So, in your opinion, is a sata 3 card, on the cheap side, worth the trouble to get installed and set up to run the primary SSD off of, or should I stick with sata 2 and fudge it?
From what I can tell, the drive will max out a sata 2 connection, and sata 3 would be nice. Do you have reccomandations on any particular card.