Sata 3 PCIe Card

[Yannic]

Hi,


I just upgraded my intel 80gb G2 SSD with one of your Crucial 256GB M4's. I love it but am running it on an early i5 overclocked bundle of yours which only supports Sata II.

I am plenty happy with the overall performance of my i5 system but would like the boot times of programs to get to the drives optimum performance, i havent upgraded it to 0009 firmware yet either.

Should I be thinking about bothering with a new bundle (Was thinking a 2600k i7 system with 8gb of ram or should I be thinking about getting a PCIe SATA 3 card? and if so, which card?

Its a win7 64b home premium install on the SSD.

 

[Claw]

I use an ASUS U3S6 controller card. It has two USB3 connectors on the rear and two internal 6gb internal SATA3 connections.

Brought my ASUS X58 WS Revolution upto date

I bought mine from OcUK but they don't seem to stock them now, you can get them for around £25 if you look.

 

[CaptainUnlikely]

Most of the cheaper SATA 3 addon cards use the Marvell 9128 controller, same as most X58 boards with SATA 3 onboard. This controller, while it will give you slightly better sequential read/write speeds than the Intel ICH10R, isn't great for random reads/writes, which is where SSDs excel. It also can't max out SATA 3 as it's a PCI-E X1 device. I wouldn't think you'd see much benefit with a cheap controller card, and the good controller cards are too expensive to be worth it IMO.