After a fair amount of research I settled on upgrading my motherboard and grabbing an SSD.
I chose the new Crucial C300, and an MSI X58A-GD65 Motherboard.
Once they arrived I quickly updated the bios, and the firmware on the drive, installed Windows 7 x64, and installed Crystal Disk Mark. Immediately, I knew something was wrong. I was only getting 200MB/s reads, and even slower writes - a far cry from the anticipated 350MB/s reads...
After some digging around on the Crucial forum I found another user with the same issue, it appears MSI thought they could get away with putting a 6Gb/s controller on a single 1x PCI-E lane (250MB/s ... ).
I'm obviously very upset, and frustrated. The solution appears to be: Buy an x4 PCI-E controller card.
I've also read some reports that Gigabyte are pulling a similar trick, you can assign a 4x lane to SATA III, and a 4x lane to USB 3, but one of your two 16x lanes drops to 8x if you do this - it's not documented anywhere, people are just figuring it out.
So my advice: Save your money, buy a board without USB3 or SATA 6Gb/s, and buy an separate card like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813995004
Posts from Crucial's Forum:
http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/C300-64GB-RAID-0-SATA-6-0Gbps-poor-performance/m-p/17084#M6289
http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/MSI-X58A-GD65-With-Marvell-SE9128/m-p/17072#M6284
http://www.forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/C300-Firmware-release-and-feedback-thread/m-p/16789#M6208
I chose the new Crucial C300, and an MSI X58A-GD65 Motherboard.
Once they arrived I quickly updated the bios, and the firmware on the drive, installed Windows 7 x64, and installed Crystal Disk Mark. Immediately, I knew something was wrong. I was only getting 200MB/s reads, and even slower writes - a far cry from the anticipated 350MB/s reads...
After some digging around on the Crucial forum I found another user with the same issue, it appears MSI thought they could get away with putting a 6Gb/s controller on a single 1x PCI-E lane (250MB/s ... ).
I'm obviously very upset, and frustrated. The solution appears to be: Buy an x4 PCI-E controller card.
I've also read some reports that Gigabyte are pulling a similar trick, you can assign a 4x lane to SATA III, and a 4x lane to USB 3, but one of your two 16x lanes drops to 8x if you do this - it's not documented anywhere, people are just figuring it out.
So my advice: Save your money, buy a board without USB3 or SATA 6Gb/s, and buy an separate card like this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813995004
Posts from Crucial's Forum:
http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/C300-64GB-RAID-0-SATA-6-0Gbps-poor-performance/m-p/17084#M6289
http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/MSI-X58A-GD65-With-Marvell-SE9128/m-p/17072#M6284
http://www.forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/C300-Firmware-release-and-feedback-thread/m-p/16789#M6208
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