SATA 3 PCI-E card add-on: Worth it?

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haremscarem

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Jun 29, 2013
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Have a system I built early this year: ASUS F2A55-M LK PLUS FM2 Motherboard
AMD A6-5400K Trinity 3.6GHz Dual-Core Desktop APU currently w/8GB RAM. The motherboard only supports SATA 2. Could I expect a decent little performance boost if I added a SATA 3 host controller to one of the PCI-E slots and connected my main (Seagate Barracuda 2TB) hardrive through it to take advantage of its full speed potential?

EDIT: Would still appreciate thoughts from anyone, but I see I did a poor search before posting this and see that I can expect little difference. So a better question: Would it be some gain though, enough maybe to justify $30 if you are the type that just can't help but constantly screw with everything, especially if itis cheap? :)
 
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bryonhowley

bryonhowley

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Oct 24, 2011
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It might on a SATA 3 SSD but that would depend on if your motherboard supports PCI-E boot, I do not have time to google your board to find out right now,. In order for it to work as a boot drive the motherboard must support PCI-E booting otherwise it will not work as boot drive and the OS would only see the drive after Windows has booted and the drivers have been loaded.
 
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avjguy2362

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Jun 21, 2012
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If you feel like spending a little money, you will not regret even a 64GB SSD for your OS and main programs. Leave all you games, music, movies, pics on your 2TB HD. You could transfer everything on you 2TB hard drive to a another drive, even borrow a friends external drive if necessary and leave only the OS and main programs, them clone it to the new SSD. Install the new SSD and transfer all you files back to the 2 TB drive, change the Startup drive preference in the BIOS and you are done. Your system will fly for less than $80 even with sata 2! Then you could justify getting the sata 3 card if you want, but it won't change things as dramatically as the SSD by itself!!! My first SSD was a 50GB Vertex2 ( sataII ) and it was very fast, when I later got a Samsung 830 and a Asus M5A99X MB ( sataIII ) it was only marginally faster, I changed mostly because the 50 GB drive was 85% full and was slowing down after about four days of use, the Samsung is never half full and is always fast, but about as fast as the Vertex II was after restarts and the first few days ( early Trim issues ). Newer drives won't have this problem, but those of us with SSD's can't stress enough how much difference they make and you will never go back to HD again for OS and main programs. Games are fine on HD!
 
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haremscarem

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Jun 29, 2013
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10,510
Thanks everyone. I want to get an SSD, but if I get one it will probably be for my little refurb Lenovo laptop just bought with the e1200 apu. runs nice with full 8gb ram, but still slower than other computers. And it has my only certified copy of Windows (8) on it. But figure between 8 and Mageia im running on it even if tighten up disc use, really need 100+ GB ssd, and $100 is a bit much for something I can't possibly justify lol. Would like to do that and take hard drive in it now and replace oldest hard drive on other computers with it. Man I am just eat up with wanting to buy s$%^ I have no need for.
 
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