Sata III controller card

[roachyuk]

i was thinking of uprgrading my mother board...so i get the 6gb/s sata ports but ive noticed the controller card....are these ok to put in a gigabyte ud5 x58 or am i better getting the new motherboard...thanks

 

[Fenlock]

If you do get a card, get the asus one ocuk sell - not the startech one.

Startech one gave me loads of hassle - hangs connecting to my c300 ssd, and driver issues (says it doesn't need one, but windows 7 moans about it).

Asus one no problem - works fine, good speed - no driver issues and you get USB3 included in the cost.

Depends if you want to upgrade to an all singing all dancing MB really. wouldn't hurt to have sata 3 and usb 3 on board.. but i doubt you will have any real use for USB 3 yet.. and there are only a few sata 3 SSD's out and they are expensive. So for the cost of £30 for the controller card it seems more sensible.

Also you need to stick the card in one of the faster PCIE slots (so if you have a sli or crossfire system it could be a problem) or theres no point in one really. My SSD read speed went up about 80mbs in a pcie x16 slot - for a total read speed of 320mbs on the c300 so im happy - but i dont use sli/cfx.

 

[roachyuk]

can i boot my system from them cards will that work thanks

 

[hash70]

i had a c-300 and a asus usb3 and it worked really well,ye you can boot from it

 

[roachyuk]

so would i be best buying 2 64gb and run raid 0 or get 1 128 one and is trim or garbage collection or do i need it thanks.

 

[Mr Paul]

Isn't the Marvell controller in these cards borked though? Apparently the 4k performance sucks compared to the SATA2 Intel controller....

 

[manishpatel80]

The asus card with the C300 64gb is great I have both. Only problem is the asus card does not have RAID. I don't care about RAID as the performance of one C300 is amazing. I get a read of 350mb/s with Crystal Disk Mark and upt 387mb/s with atto.

Writes are slow with this SSD, but I use the drive only as a read drive for windows 7. Also note that using the marvel drivers does not support trim, but reverting back to MS drivers does. Also the intel drive maybe be better at TRIM, but cannot get Sata 3 speed i.e. no 350mb/s as they are using the marvel sata 3 card.

 

[mothermachine]

i'm using the startech sata600 PCI card with my C300 128GB on MS drivers and it's utterly awesome tbh. no issues whatsoever.

 

[danielanthony]

i'm using the startech sata600 PCI card with my C300 128GB on MS drivers and it's utterly awesome tbh. no issues whatsoever.

But is TRIM working?

 

[mothermachine]

how can i tell?

performance has not degraded at all and there's only 13GB free.

 

[hash70]

ive got 2x128gb c-300 in raid0 and i get 600 read/260 wtite,if i was you id get 2x64gb and raid them,and no you wont get trim but the carbage collection takes care of it

 

[lukext]

But is TRIM working?

whether or not trim is work depends on the drivers used and not specifically just the controller.

If you user the marvell drives = trim not working

if you use the stock windows 7 drivers (msachi) = trim working

 

[lawz]

Is there a way to confirm that it is working though?

 

[lukext]

you can check if the command is being sent (as below), but not that its being acted upon

open a command window

type: fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

If the result is '0' TRIM is enabled.