[SOLVED] Expansion Card for DX58SO

[naabjenia]

Hello, everyone!

I've had an X58 system for 9 years now (specs below), and I'm still looking to get the most out of it. Therefore, I have recently bought a Kingston A400 480GB SSD for it, which is a SATA III SSD. However, my motherboard does not have SATA III ports, only SATA II ones, so I'm currently using that SSD on a SATA II port, which yields satisfactory results, but just about half of what it could be in terms of speed.

So, one of these days I was looking for ways to work around that issue and I found out about expansion cards, such as the ASUS U3S6. This card should be connected to the PCIe x4 2.0 port and it would give me a couple of USB 3.0 and SATA III ports.
The thing is, however:
a) is the drive connected to the expansion card bootable, so that I can install Windows 10 Pro x64 in it?
b) is it compatible with DX58SO?

It doesn't need to be the U3S6, I just used it as an example. So if you know about another expansion card that works, I'm listening!

I would like your help and ideas to work around this issue.
Please, remember that my motherboard only has PCIe 2.0 slots! The unpopulated ones are one x16, one x4 and two x1.

Given that, I also thought: why not NVMe? So I found out about HyperX Predator PCIe SSD, which is a card that would also be connected to the PCIe 2.0 x4 slot and would have a NVMe SSD installed on it. Could that work as the bootable SSD on a DX58SO? I've read some things about the need for UEFI, and the DX58SO has UEFI mode (you can turn it on and off), I just don't know how well it works.

Once again, I've used that model as an example. I'm open to ideas and other models!

Anyway, thank you very much for the help!

System Specs:
Intel Xeon W3690
Intel DX58SO
GTX 1060 6GB
3x4GB 1333MHz RAM
500GB HDD
480GB SSD

 

[hang-the-9]

So there is a bunch of stuff on here, but the simple answer is that a SATA 3 drive will work just fine on a SATA 2 port. You are not losing any speed that would be noticeable to you. Getting all that extra equipment is really just wasted money, spend it on a newer CPU/motherboard, better monitor/keyboard/mouse, etc..

 

[naabjenia]

Alright, then. Thanks for the heads-up.

Although I think I would notice the difference going to an NVMe drive, I'm not even sure that would work properly and the price of an adapter is high.

And about the SATA 3, I asked because I found some cheap cards that combine USB 3.0 and SATA 3 (much cheaper than changing the whole combo), but I get your point.

Anyway, the question still stands: would it work?

Again, thank you for your insight!

 

[hang-the-9]

If you want to know if you can boot off the cards, the card specs or web site info should tell you that.