Vertex Plus on a PCIe 2.0 x1 card

Hey all,

I picked up my first SSD a couple weeks ago, a 120GB OCZ Vertex Plus, for $120-$30 rebate. I've got an ASRock N7AD-SLI mobo with 6 SATA II slots, but four of them are dedicated to 2TB HDDs as a 6TB. It turns out I can't set up 4 of these for RAID and use one for non-RAID OS drive, but I've got 2 PCIe 2.0 x1 slots that I'm not using for anything else. Two PCIe 2.0 x1 slots are unused, as is one PCI slot. As such, I'm planing on picking up a PCIe x1 card that will supply me a separate SATA II slot to connect my boot SSD to.

While I'm at it, I'd like to add 1-4 USB 3.0 ports. There are several options on NewEgg that would give me one internal SATA II connector and multiple USB 3.0 ports.

Ultimately, I'm concerned about speed restrictions. According to my research, PCIe 2.0 x1 has a max throughput of 500 MB/s. Of that, the Vertex Plus peaks at 250 MB/s, but tends more toward 188 MB/s. USB 3.0 uses 400 MB/s. So, it seems to me that even if I pick up a card with one SATA II slot and one or more USB 3.0 slots, the PCIe x1 is going to bottleneck at 500 MB/s. Of course, this will only happen if I'm pulling data from all 3 (or more), but I don't see it as unreasonable that I will want to transfer/copy data from one USB 3.0 device to another while also using the OS (duh).

I could buy one card that has one SATA II internal slot and one USB 3.0 slot, then also buy a second PCIe x1 card dedicated strictly to USB 3.0, but that would eat both of my PCIe slots. While I don't have any plans for the second one, I'd like to hang onto the flexibility.

There is also the option of just picking up a PCI or PCIe 4x SATA II RAID 5 controller, but then I'd be wasting 4 or 5 of the mobo SATA II slots, and that just seems like a huge waste.

I do realize that this is pretty much an obsolete box. I intend to maintain it as a data server once I get around to building a current machine.

What do you guys think? What would you suggest? Anything I'm failing to consider?

Thanks!

Luke