SATA 3 PCI Card

I bought a SATA card in advance of buying a SSD. I wanted to make sure the card and the port worked OK. I figured a $20 loss would be preferable to buying a SSD and finding out the port wouldn't work. == Anyway, I put the card in and hooked my present OS HD drive to it. Things worked OK. I did notice one thing that I found very unusual. When booting an additional screen shows up saying something like "PCI card found and is using so and so HD". Since we have an extra screen here it seems to me this would slow down the booting of the SSD. Do any of you have this extra screen also?

Hello Jim,

Yeah, this is normal for RAID and SSD/HDD controller type cards to have a boot screen for them to be able to set settings and/or format/setup the drives with.

The PCI-E SSD card I have has one for it.

Brink said:

Hello Jim,

Yeah, this is normal for RAID and SSD/HDD controller type cards to have a boot screen for them to be able to set settings and/or format/setup the drives with.

The PCI-E SSD card I have has one for it.

Thanks very much

Anytime Jim. :)

Jim, unless your Motherboard has Generation 2 pcie slots this card will only work at Sata2 speeds.
I installed a similar card and can only get Sata2 speed from my OCZ Vertex Sata3 SSD.

kodi said:

Jim, unless your Motherboard has Generation 2 pcie slots this card will only work at Sata2 speeds.
I installed a similar card and can only get Sata2 speed from my OCZ Vertex Sata3 SSD.

Isn't the difference between SATA 2 and SATA 3 very small? I would probably be just as good then getting a SATA 2 SSD, is that right?

SATA 3 is close to double the bandwidth of SATA 2. However, you will only get SATA 3 speeds if the SSD is SATA 3 and is connected to a SSD 3 port on the motherboard. You will also need to pay attention to the read/write speeds of the SSD. Just because the SSD is SATA 3 doesn't mean that it will be able get to SATA 3 speeds.

Serial ATA - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Since your current motherboard is only SATA 2, then you may be better off and save money getting a SATA 2 SSD instead unless you plan on upgrading to a motherboard with native SATA 3 ports.

I assume you will use the SSD for the OS (rather than for shoving large amounts of big block data around). In that case, it will really make very, very little difference whether you have a Sata2 or Sata3 SSD or port.

The OS performs so well because of the extremely short access times of the SSDs. As far as data is concerned, it does not move large masses around and that mostely in 4K blocks (which is nowhere near the advertised speeds).

The rest is for measurements and bragging purposes without little practical consequences. Too bad you wasted $20.

whs said:

The rest is for measurements and bragging purposes without little practical consequences. Too bad you wasted $20.

No, nothing is wasted. I only have two SATA ports on my MB. They were both being used. If I am buying a SSD, I needed to have a SATA PCI card to connect the third drive to.