I have a system from around 2007 with a Radeon Xpress 200 chipset. I want to find out what the fastest storage is that it can use. It has PCIe 1.0 and SATA II. Currently, I have a SATA III SSD in it, but the slot is limited to 300 MB/s instead of 600 MB/s which the SSD is capable of. According to Wikipedia, if the full PCIe slot is used, it can achieve a throughput of 4 GB/s. I looked into M.2 to PCIe cards, but the motherboard is way too old to support that unless BIOS mods could be done (which sounds like a bad idea).
Then, I came up with the idea of using a SATA PCIe RAID card. If I could find a RAID card that uses the full slot (x16), I'm sure I could achieve something higher than 300 MB/s. The problem is that most of these cards only use part of the slot. I see a few cards that either use x8 or x16. Most of them are HighPoint RAID cards.
Is a faster solution than what I currently have even possible? What solution would I use? If I were to use PCIe, would it be bootable? Could I get a card with some kind of boot controller that would allow it to boot with legacy BIOS?
Then, I came up with the idea of using a SATA PCIe RAID card. If I could find a RAID card that uses the full slot (x16), I'm sure I could achieve something higher than 300 MB/s. The problem is that most of these cards only use part of the slot. I see a few cards that either use x8 or x16. Most of them are HighPoint RAID cards.
Is a faster solution than what I currently have even possible? What solution would I use? If I were to use PCIe, would it be bootable? Could I get a card with some kind of boot controller that would allow it to boot with legacy BIOS?