Windows 10: Sata III PCI cards for computer with SATA II ports on mobo

I have a DIY box with an Asus P5K-E mobo that provides SATA II ports. I upgraded to a pair of Samsung 850 EVO ssds and naturally got a great speed boost. Now I am getting greedy and thinking about doubling my gains with a SATA III controller card. I have been reading online and I am seeing indications that I may not get much if any speed boost that way. Would those of you experienced with doing what I am contemplating please chime in and tell me if you achieved improvement and if so what card did you use? I am running Windows 10 Pro and Windows 10 Home, one on each ssd, no RAID is involved.

:)

 

Have 4 x 3.o Gb ports and 2 x 6 Gb ports. How do they differ?

A SATA II interface has a maximum throughput of 3 GB/s. A SATA III interface has a maximum throughput of 6 GB/s. That's in a laboratory. You won't see anything close to either of those in real life.

If you're connecting a SATA III device, use a SATA III port. If you're connecting a SATA II device, use a SATA II port.

 

Have 4 x 3.o Gb ports and 2 x 6 Gb ports. How do they differ?

In literal terms it does not matter. SATA III ports will accept SATA II devices and SATA III devices will work at SATA II speeds.

As has been said if you have suitable devices match them to the required port to get the best performance. The only consideration is how these ports are provided. On some motherboards the SATA III are on a dedicated chipset (JMicron, Marvell) and some features
require a driver to be loaded. With only two SATA II devices I found it simpler to disable the second SATA interface in the BIOS and leave the drivers off.

 

I have not tried any bus card, but looking at the age of your mother board and not knowing your CPU or Memory speed, you probably will not get the full sata III speeds that your looking for. Best to get on-board Sata III support.

 

Or just not worry about it. It is my test box and not my primary computer. The ssds are pretty fast even throttled back by the SATA II connections. Like all us enthusiasts, I'm always looking to tweak.

 

If you use a PCIe card you may get speeds somewhere in between but there is still a question of compatibility and card has to be bootable of course, not all of them are.

 

Do you have a card in mind? I have three open universal PCI slots. I'm OK on the theory.

 

Can't remember now what I had and tried (it was 4 or 5 years ago) but I was unimpressed, couldn't see any real life improvement. It may have some uses if used to add more SATA ports, some have ability to daisy chain drives on same port.

 

Yeah, they are called port multipliers. It also matters how many lanes the card supports. On an x4 card with four ports using all four is a mistake because daisy chained or not all the attached drives will use the same lane. Or something like that.

 

I have seen some with PCIe x4, they may be better.

 

Cbarnhorst
sata 3 pcie cards need pciexpress version 2 .
Your motherboard has only one pci e 2 and it is for grafiks card.
The other two are pci express version 1 provided by southbridhe ich9r and limited only to 250mb/sec.
Your sata 2 ports are 300 mb/secons so you are quicker.

The minimum requirement to run properly a sata 3 pcie card is the chipset x58 whitch provides multiple pcie 2 slots and its line provide 500mb/s (sata 3 provides 600mb/s so the cost is a little).

EdIt:
Now i found the manual of your motherboard and also your pci e for youur grafiks card it is also 1 version.

 

That's the answer I was looking for. Thanks!