PCI express or SATA 2

[dave_39]

Hi
How much additional overall speed of a ssd could be expected by adding a PCI SATA 3 adapter apposed to using it on a SATA 2 only motherboard. I've read that the performance of SATA 3 to be double that of 2 but would a PCI produce the same results?

 

[offroadguy56]

An SSD will most certainly benefit moving from SATA 2 to SATA 3.

A hard drive not so much. My WD Black 1TB, one of the higher performance hard drives, can write at about 150MB/s sequential. That's half of SATA 2. And my SSD will write about 515MB/s. But that's not the full story. There's much to learn about SATA and storage drive speeds and would certainly be worth the effort to learn.

For quick reference. SATA 1 is 150MB/s, SATA 2 300MB/s, SATA 3 600MB/s. Sequential writes and reads are slower and apply to larger files like movies. Random writes and reads favor smaller files and SSDs really excel at that.

PCI-E 3.0 has 985MB/s data throughput per lane. PCI-E has a max size of 16 lanes. Motherboards will support x1, x4, x8, and x16. The amount of lanes used will depend on the expansion card. Since you mention you have no SATA 3 it's likely you have PCI-E 2.0 in which case the max data rate is 500MB/s per lane.

 

[USAFRet]

Additionally, this would probably only be beneficial for a secondary SSD.

A motherboard old enough to have only SATA II ports is unlikely to be able to boot from a drive connected via a PCIe slot.

 

[dave_39]

MERGED QUESTION
Question from dave_39 : "PCI express or SATA 2"

Hi
How much additional overall speed of a ssd could be expected by adding a PCI SATA 3 adapter apposed to using it on a SATA 2 only motherboard. I've read that the performance of SATA 3 to be double that of 2 but would a PCI produce the same results?

 

[dave_39]

Thanks for your replies.

What do I look for so as to establish if my mb would boot from the PCI?

 

[USAFRet]

Thanks for your replies.

What do I look for so as to establish if my mb would boot from the PCI?

The motherboard user manual.
What board is this?

 

[dave_39]

The mb is msi (microstar) 760gm-p23 (fx)

 

[USAFRet]

I'm not seeing anything in the user manual or specifications that says it can do it.
https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/760GM-P23-FX/Specification
https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/support/760GM-P23-FX#down-manual

Unless it says specifically Yes, assume it can't.

 

[dave_39]

I suppose the other option open to me would be changed the mb. Ideally if I could get a SATA 3 mb that would utilise my existing CPU and memory

 

[USAFRet]

I suppose the other option open to me would be changed the mb. Ideally if I could get a SATA 3 mb that would utilise my existing CPU and memory

A typical SATA III SSD in a SATA II port still reaps most (but not all) of the benefits of having the SSD. Near instant response time.
The throughput will of course be slower than a SATA III port, but it is still a big advantage over an HDD.

Changing the motherboard? I'd reserve that for a full system rebuild.