[ljo000]

My Samsung spinpoint HDD that housed my OS finally died so I took the opportunity to replace it with a OCZ Agility 3 90GB. Everything is working and the speed of the drive is a great improvement. However, my mobo is an Asus P5Q-E that only has SATA II ports. I'd like to add a SATA III card and move the SSD to it to take full advantage of the disk's speed. Will this work given that the OS is on the drive?


I was planning on buying something like the below controller card (or something else on recommendation), installing it and the driver etc, then moving the SSD to it. Is it that easy or is there anything else I have to do to get this to work?

SYBA SY-PEX40039 PCI-Express 2.0 SATA III (6.0Gb/s) Controller Card

 

[hirent]

Well, the only thing you need to worry about is whether your BIOS will allow you to boot from a drive connected to a card?

Most boards do.

I believe what most users do is, to first connect the SSD directly to the board, install the OS; then disconnect and connect it to the card and in the BIOS set the SSD as the boot drive.

Every board is different, in some boards there is no distinction between a direct connected and a card connected drive. If so, then your job will be very simple indeed.

 

[ljo000]

OK thanks. I think I'll just try it and see what happens. I imagine disconnecting the other HDDs would be a good idea too. Also is the controller card I linked to any good? Is there a better (or equal for cheaper) option?

 

[Zon2020]

You won't notice any difference in the real world. I have both. Yes there is a difference in benchmark speed. I just don't think it's visible in use.


See Tom's Hardware - Upgrade Advice: Does Your Fast SSD Really Need SATA 6Gb/s?


Personally I wouldn't mess with it.

 

[hirent]

There is a Rocket Raid SATA III card for $28 including shipping. You could try that.

I'm almost certain that's what I have; will have to check once I get home.

Also, remember that PCIe 1x will max total speed of 500MB/s, so if you connect anything else to this card the speeds could be split between the SSD and the other drive. I'm not sure if it will have any negative impact on the SSD's speeds, but its just something to keep in mind.

 

[DeanM]

Be careful of the RocketRaid cards. Some of those RAID cards tend to significantly increase boot time (ie. hanging in BIOS for what seems like forever as they scan the SATA/eSATA ports for HDDs). I was using a RR622 for a while to get eSATA w/ multiplier support on my server. Eventually ripped it out and replaced it with a non-RAID eSATA card (from SIIG, I think) because I got tired of waiting for the RR during boot every time I had to do significant maintenance on the machine (ie. installing new OS, or playing w/ new hardware, tweaking fan config... stuff that involves lots of restarts).


I say don't mess with it. You won't notice the difference (except in benchmarks) anyway...

You're just causing potential problems and spending money (IMO, unnecessarily...)

 

[ljo000]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Zon2020  /t/1415053/moving-os-ssd-from-mobo-to-sata-card#post_22120967


You won't notice any difference in the real world. I have both. Yes there is a difference in benchmark speed. I just don't think it's visible in use.

See Tom's Hardware - Upgrade Advice: Does Your Fast SSD Really Need SATA 6Gb/s?

Personally I wouldn't mess with it.

That article was interesting. I am mostly looking to improve on the boot time but it doesn't look like it would be worth the expense. Thanks for the info!

 

[Zon2020]

Somehow, neither the cost nor the potential complications seem worthwhile for a tenth of a second difference.


That's a really telling chart in that article:



"Measuring boot time is one of the best examples of how an SSD excels. You get a mix of random and sequential reads, along with some write operations attributable to logging. Queue depths during Windows boot can easily exceed four, as the operating system accesses multiple files in quick succession or at the same time.


The differences between the SSDs are again very minor, while the hard drive drags. Don't expect SATA 6Gb/s to buy you any additional speed in this metric, though."



Tom's hardware has done some really good work in a bunch of articles addressing actual performance and expectations with respect to SSDs.