Adding another SATA III port

[azbytes]

Can someone please tell me how to connect an additional SATA III port to my GA-X58A-UD7 motherboard. I purchased a SSD and would like to use a SATA III port for it. The problem is that I have the two(SATA III ports) on the board, already occupied by two other drives. I was thinking of installing this controller card, but I am unsure of where/how to install it- HighPoint Rocket 620a Serial ATA Controller 2 Serial ATA/600 Thanks for any info!

 

[a4mula]

The highpoint installs in a pci-e slot. It's designed for a x1 slot but will fit/work in any available slot. Just install it, install drivers, connect drive and go.

If you have 2x mechanical drives on the Sata 6Gb/s ports you could move one of them to a Sata 3Gb/s controller. It'd suffer no performance penalty as mechanical drives do not saturate the bandwidth.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Highpoint is going to cap at pci-e x1 speeds which is 500Mb/s * .8 (8b/10b encoding) = 400Mb/s. Many current SSDs will saturate this entirely. It's not a huge deal and probably not something I'd drop $150 on one of the x2/x4 cards to fix.

If you plan on adding additional SSDs and/or RAID0 setups you might consider something like the Rocket Raid 2720 SGL $159.99 as it supports up to 8 drives via SAS expanders and does so on an x8 lane.

 

[azbytes]

Thanks for the great advice a4mula! I have asked this question in other forums and did not get a clear answer, such as yours!

I had this PC custom built by CPUSolutions specifically for video-editing. They put my D and E drives in the two SATA III ports on the board. My Velociraptor Hard Drive was the C drive (which I replaced with the SSD). It WAS on a SATA II port. My Windows Experience Index for the "drive" portion has now gone from 7.8 to 7.9

I do have one more question, however- If my SSD has a transfer rate around 550mbps, why would a 6gbps port connection even matter? What am I missing? Thanks.









Windows 7 64 bit, i7 980x @333 6 core processor, 12 GB ram DDR 1600, Radeon 5850 GPU, OCZ Vertex 3 120GB SSD

 

[a4mula]

I do have one more question, however- If my SSD has a transfer rate around 550mbps, why would a 6gbps port connection even matter? What am I missing? Thanks.

It's 6Gbp/s vs 550MBp/s.

Bits vs Bytes. 6 gigabits = 768 megabytes. 3 gigabits (3Gb/s) = 384 megabytes.

So, a 550 megabyte SSD would saturate a 3Gb/s lane easily.

 

[azbytes]

I do have one more question, however- If my SSD has a transfer rate around 550mbps, why would a 6gbps port connection even matter? What am I missing? Thanks.

It's 6Gbp/s vs 550MBp/s.

Bits vs Bytes. 6 gigabits = 768 megabytes. 3 gigabits (3Gb/s) = 384 megabytes.

So, a 550 megabyte SSD would saturate a 3Gb/s lane easily.

OK, thanks....I keep thinking a "GB" is 10 x 1,000 MB..... Guess I better brush up on my measurement units

 

[a4mula]

OK, thanks....I keep thinking a "GB" is 10 x 1,000 MB..... Guess I better brush up on my measurement units

The main difference is bits vs bytes.

A bit is a single 0 or 1

A byte is 8x of these bits to form a binary equivalence of 0-255.

So, while 1 Gigabyte is equal to 1,000 Megabytes.

1 Gigabit is only equal to 128 Megabytes.

Just watch for the differences in capital B as in GB vs lowercase b as in Gb.

GB = Gigabyte
Gb = Gigabit

MB = Megabyte
Mb = Megabit

So forth and so on.

 

[azbytes]

Best answer selected by azbytes.

 

[azbytes]

a4mula, I decided against the SATA card. The D and E drives seem to work quite well in the SATA II ports. Clearly, switching the C drive to one of the two SATA III ports was the way to go! Thanks for all the good info/advice!

azbytes

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey