SATA Question

bigmck · 26 Feb 2012

My motherboard is from 2006. The manual says I have SATA 1 ports. I have ordered a SATA PCIe X1 controller card which says that it is SATA 3. Two questions. If I buy a SSD SATA 3, will it actually get SATA 3 since my MB does not support that? Would I be better off to plug my SSD in my SATA 3 card or would it matter? Thanks,

bobkn · 26 Feb 2012

The PCI-E controller will give you SATA 3, but whether you'll get the full 6Gb data rate, I don't know. The lack of SATA 3 on the motherboard is not relevant to the card.

I'd plug the SSD into the card, if the PC can boot from it (and if you want it to be the OS drive, like most of us).

Note that some people use PCI-E SSD drives (example: OCZ RevoDrive) to get higher data rates than are available with SATA 3.

If you were forced to use the SATA 1 ports, there are worse things in life than 1.5Gb/s (=187.5GB/s). It was good enough for the original Western Digital Raptor (10k RPM) hard drives.

bigmck · 27 Feb 2012

bobkn said:

The PCI-E controller will give you SATA 3, but whether you'll get the full 6Gb data rate, I don't know. The lack of SATA 3 on the motherboard is not relevant to the card.

I'd plug the SSD into the card, if the PC can boot from it (and if you want it to be the OS drive, like most of us).

Note that some people use PCI-E SSD drives (example: OCZ RevoDrive) to get higher data rates than are available with SATA 3.

If you were forced to use the SATA 1 ports, there are worse things in life than 1.5Gb/s (=187.5GB/s). It was good enough for the original Western Digital Raptor (10k RPM) hard drives.

That is good news. Thanks very much for your help.