Best Bang For Buck Of SSDs On Old Motherbaord

SoildSnake · 23 Aug 2011 at 20:15

Motherboard: Asus P5Q Pro Turbo
SSD: Agility 3 60GB
OS: Windows 7

1) The performance is, in real-world performance, booting, scans, loading etc, say 20% faster than my Velociraptor. What gains can i expect from using a sata 3 card; like the Asus U3S6, Startech 2-Port SATA III 6Gbps or the Highpoint RocketRAID 620?

2) What about if i raided 0 them using the RocketRaid or the Startech (don't think the U3S6 is raid compatible) or just through my motherboard on sata 2

3) If i was to raid, would there be issues of dual booting? The other OS would be on a different drive but i want to be able to "disconnect device" ie the Raided drives via device manager when booting into the other OS and vice versa; would that be a problem?

Thanks

SoildSnake · 24 Aug 2011 at 16:06

Please can i get some advise on this

DrBombcrater · 24 Aug 2011 at 20:49

You're probably best sticking with the motherboard's SATA 3Gbit ports. All those SATA 6Gbit cards use the Marvell controller, which is notoriously poor and usually no faster (and sometimes slower) than on-board 3Gbit. Going RAID would cause long-term performance issues with the SSD as the RAID drives don't pass the TRIM command to the SSDs.

SoildSnake · 26 Aug 2011 at 14:24

What if i buy one of these cards and do NOT raid; surly i would get a bit of a performance boost due to sata6. Though since its marvel would TRIM/GC still work?

Also i was under the impressing Raiding SSDs was fine due to on board garbage collection. What exactly do you mean by long term damage; like a few years? Or having to sanitize and reformat monthly?

panyan · 26 Aug 2011 at 14:38

SoildSnake said:
Also i was under the impressing Raiding SSDs was fine due to on board garbage collection. What exactly do you mean by long term damage; like a few years? Or having to sanitize and reformat monthly?

i dont think any ssd's collect garbage by themselves, it has to be initated by by the OS (windows 7 for example)

if you dont have garbage collection, you need to run it manually whenever using the computer or it will significantly slow down after a few months

i am not sure if the garbage collection program is for old ssd's without TRIM support or for raided ssd's

SoildSnake · 30 Aug 2011 at 13:15

okay i wont bother raiding right now; but can someone confirm that i will get a performance increase by using a sata 3 card over my sata 2 port on the asus p5q?

Also are there any drawbacks to using one of these cards; like the marvel chipset affecting trim or anything else?

SoildSnake · 31 Aug 2011 at 17:03

Bane · 31 Aug 2011 at 21:58

I thought the boot time would increase slightly using an add-in card.

As the responsiveness of SSD's comes from low access time I doubt you would see any improvement in normal desktop usage getting an add-in card. Unless you want faster transfer speeds moving large files.

You could check if Agility has new firmware to improve performance. But got to remember the Agility is locked to make it more affordable.

skyripper · 31 Aug 2011 at 22:54

Whats the storage chipset on the P5Q? The P5K is an intel ICH9 which aint that hot with modern SSDs. I used to get around 100MB/s on a Vertex, and when I switched to a Vertex 2E, that rose to over 220MB/s - but that was benchmarks.

In real everyday use, I dont notice the difference between the old one and the new one. The difference in going from a normal hard drive to an SSD was the killer for me, and why I wont ever (willingly) not have an SSD to boot from...

I doubt bumping up your storage controller will make a massive difference.