Sata III Controller Card

TNGL

TNGL

TNGL

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Well leading on from this thread, http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18304509 (yes I know it was created 3 months ago, but I've had other financial commitments) I've been thinking about buying a SATA III controller card to accompany my SSD (when I buy it :p) to fully squeeze all of the performance out of it, the reason for buying a controller card is because my motherboard is SATA II and I'm not in a position to upgrade it at the moment. However, I'm also aware that controller cards usually come with bugs, and may not boost the performance very much compared to just using the SSD on a SATA II port.

So I've got two questions:
Is it even worth buying a controller card?
If it is worth buying a controller card, which one would you recommend (preferably one which will not require any extra drivers, won't cause crashes and will take full advantage of the SSD's features, TRIM e.g.)?

I'm not looking to spend much money on a controller card; £45 at the most and £50 if it's really worth it.
 
stulid said:
http://uk.asus.com/Motherboards/Accessories/U3S6/

Thats compatible with your board.



Not really, you will still notice te massive improvement of a SSD while being limited to 300MB/s (roughly), then when you do upgrade your board you get a second boost in performance.
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Nice find Stulid, thanks; I've just watched a few reviews of this controller card, and apparently it uses a Marvel controller, which I've heard isn't very good. Also, I see that it comes with a driver disc, does this mean that when I go to install Windows on the SSD that will be connected to the card, that I'll have to insert this disc and load the drivers?
 
does this mean that when I go to install Windows on the SSD that will be connected to the card, that I'll have to insert this disc and load the drivers?
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Not 100% on this, while installing Win7 I don't think I have seen an option to load a driver before installation like XP use to do. It must be a bit like installing Windows7 onto a normal motherboard with SATAIII ports, you install the chipset drivers after the installation is complete don't you.
 
stulid said:
Not 100% on this, while installing Win7 I don't think I have seen an option to load a driver before installation like XP use to do. It must be a bit like installing Windows7 onto a normal motherboard with SATAIII ports, you install the chipset drivers after the installation is complete don't you.
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Oh okay, I was on about was this kind of message/situation (link). Hopefully everything will go well, if it doesn't I'll be sure to post my issues here :D
 
Theres nothing stopping you from installing windows as normal, connected to the motherboard and then plugging it into the card after? do the swap maybe before any chipset drivers are installed of any disks?

The specs for the card say it supports AHCI, so make sure the motherboards SATA controller is also set to this before the installation? so when you swap them over it doesn't BSOD or fail to boot up.
 
stulid said:
Theres nothing stopping you from installing windows as normal, connected to the motherboard and then plugging it into the card after? do the swap maybe before any chipset drivers are installed of any disks?

The specs for the card say it supports AHCI, so make sure the motherboards SATA controller is also set to this before the installation? so when you swap them over it doesn't BSOD or fail to boot up.
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Okay, I'll bear that in mind if I experience any issues. I was going to ask about if I should set the controller to IDE or AHCI actually, but I forgot. I do have one more question though; I have a mATX board so the PCIe lanes aren't very spaced out. Do you think my graphics card's temperatures will be affected by installing this card in the lane below my graphics card? Or do you think I should go through the hassle of putting the card in the bottom x16 lane and putting the controller card in the top lane?
 
OK I've looked into this in detail a few days back, the SATA-2 mobo that I was looking at is also crippled by no AHCI. Yes I could cross flash it but I don't feel like wasting my time on that.

Now if you look on youtube and the bay there are some really cheap ASM1061 1x pci-e cards than 'can' give you SATA-3 performance.

However here's the caveat

Ensure your motherboard supports PCI-e 2.0 as PCI-e 1.1 simply doesn't have the bandwidth, so then I looked at a PCI-e 4x cards only to find that the bandwidth is still split 1x per port grrrrr
 
Subliminal Aura said:
OK I've looked into this in detail a few days back, the SATA-2 mobo that I was looking at is also crippled by no AHCI. Yes I could cross flash it but I don't feel like wasting my time on that.

Now if you look on youtube and the bay there are some really cheap ASM1061 1x pci-e cards than 'can' give you SATA-3 performance.

However here's the caveat

Ensure your motherboard supports PCI-e 2.0 as PCI-e 1.1 simply doesn't have the bandwidth, so then I looked at a PCI-e 4x cards only to find that the bandwidth is still split 1x per port grrrrr
Click to expand...

Thanks for that :) But would it apply to me? As my motherboard does support AHCI as well as IDE.
 
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