Adding a SATAIII Controller Card

[Kaos Kid]

If I want to add a PCI-Express 2.0 SATA III (6.0Gb/s) Controller Card (adds 2 slots) to my Giga 785 SATA II board, will it in theory give me a reasonable boost for my SATAIII SSD, or does the board's lack of PCI Express 2.0 slot make any benefits null or even not compatible with the controller card?

Here are the board's expansion slot specs:

1 x PCI Express x16 slot, running at x16 (PCIEX16)
(The PCI Express x16 slot conforms to PCI Express 2.0 standard.)
1 x PCI Express x1 slot
2 x PCI slots

If the controller card would give some improvement, would it be better to install it into the PCI-E slot or the PCI-E x1 slot? Please forgive my ignorance, I have never owned a piece of hardware that used either of these slots

Thanks!

PS The Egg has a Syba card for $15 shipped today so I figured I'd give it a shot if it would boost my speeds any amount past the SATA II speeds I get now with my SATA III SSD in this board.

[Major_A]

Probably won't see much improvement. Some older systems won't give you the option to boot from a PCIe card. Care to send the link to the card on the Egg? I'm curious to see what chipset it's using (Marvell, ASMedia, etc...).

[Kaos Kid]

This is my board

GA-MA785GMT-UD2H

This is the link the the card, it shows that it is the ASM1061 Chipset

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6816124045

I didn't end up getting it, although some in the reviews section said that they got it to work on their boards by installing it first and letting Windows 7 install the drivers for it, then shutting down and transferring the boot drive over to the controller card. I don't know why this board wouldn't though, I've had way older boards boot to IDE controller add-in cards . I guess the only way to know for sure was to get it first to test it. What I was hoping was to raise my current 250 MB/s times up into the 400+ MB/s ranges to speed up this board a bit since I am using a SATAIII SSD in it. Seems a shame to be bottlenecked by the board, even though it is still faster than when it was booting to the SATAII HDD.

I had $20 sitting in my PP account and it looked like a good use for it at the time, but I ended up getting busy last nite looking for a used car on CL (mine needs a fuel pump among other things and isn't worth sinking that $700 into when it also needs an A/C and heater core replaced ). While doing that I forgot to go back to the Egg and get it, it was the last ShellShocker of the day so I had until midnight but had other things on my mind.

[Major_A]

It's $20.99 at Amazon if it's still something you want to try. But given what it is and what you want if for I still say skip it.

[skier]

not sure if you've already gotten it, but I had a SATA III controller in my i7 system, it has great read speeds, but write speeds were in the neighborhood of 6MB/s lol I installed windows to it and then pulled it out of my system- the cheap ones don't seem to work

[Kaos Kid]

Nope, didn't get it. My load times now from boot to full load with antivirus, malwarebytes and wifi internet connectivity with nothing being updated on a reboot runs around a minute now, on my SATAIII system with the same model SSD is about 30 seconds total (same programs loading but hardwired internet) so I decided I could live with it for now. If someone comes on raving about a card they have that is reasonably priced I may rethink it, but otherwise I'm not willing to go over $20 if I'm not going to get a lot of performance increase. Thanks for your input, I don't know if the write speeds would be detrimental or not I use bittorrent on this PC but have a separate SATAII HDD for that, only use the SSD for the operating system itself.

[Major_A]

On your SATA 2/wireless computer do you have any network shares that load with Windows? I've found that loading Windows with wireless shares at least doubles the load times. I'm using a SATA 3 SSD on an Intel P35 SATA 2 board and load Windows in under 30 seconds. As soon as I add a network share it takes over a minute. Food for thought.

[Kaos Kid]

I don't have any network shares, no printers on the network, I don't have homegroup set up because right now I don't share between the computers on my network. This is what my network window looks like:

Network.JPG (48.13 KiB) Viewed 37536 times

Those two routers aren't in my network (I use a DIR-850L) but I was told that since they are within range of my adapter on this box (main level) Windows7 has them listed in there for ease of joining those networks with wifi direct if I so desire (click to configure and it asks for pin numbers). I don't know why those two particular ones show up when I have 20 neighbors' wifi networks show up on my adapter's connections lists, maybe it is because these two routers have networks that are open with no security setup? I do see two networks that are unsecured at the time of this writing (coincidence?), one of them labelled "GoldCheetah-guest" is setup as a pay-by-the-hour connection since I tried hooking to it once and it popped up a paywall. Methinks if their provider knew about that they would lose their service, lol. If they have Charter like I do, they would be in trouble for it I'm sure.

What does load at bootup:

Malwarebytes
Comodo Internet Security Suite (Firewall, DefensePlus, Antivirus)
Peerblock
AIDA64
RaLink Wireless Utility for my Rosewill 600UBE Dual-band Wifi Adapter

The Malwarebytes and Comodo both do some sort of flashscans at bootup, and Peerblock also updates its lists at loadup, and AIDA64 does hardware scans for system info, so I think maybe all those things together add some seconds to the bootup on this box. If you can think of something else besides these programs that could be causing slower load times, then I'd be glad to hear. I also have compared load times using the M$ SATA AHCI drivers compared to AMD's SATA drivers and found no appreciable difference in boot times, and only a slight difference in read/write times per ATTO, CrystalDiskInfo, and AS-SSD Benchmarks.

One of these days I may get around to trying to setup a network drive on the router itself since it has Cloud capabilities, but haven't had a pressing need for it just yet since my family members don't have smartphones or smartdevices that need to sync or share. Even my music library is only about 80GB of mp3s so I have it duplicated on my PC and on my HTPC.

[sgkean]

Have you checked your event viewer to check your boot times, and see what is taking the time? I wrote a document on how to check it for work, I can put it here if you'd like. It comes in handy to see what is exactly taking the time to load at boot.

[skier]

I think most of your problem is the apps that load at boot then, primarily your AV. I personally only run AV scans if I can already tell I have a virus, which is rare but I'm the only one that uses my PC (Built a separate one for the Fiancee to play the Sims )

Why would you load Aida64 at boot? I havn't used it since the Everest days, but isn't it just the gawk at your specs every once in a while or if you forget whats in your system? (chipset, BIOS etc.) I just use CPUz and GPUz

of your list, I would turn off MBAM and Aida (unless you paid for MBAM pro)

for reference, my boot time with my i7 at 4GHz and a Toshiba 128GB SATA3 SSD (on a SATA2 controller) is about 20-25seconds from powered off to fully loaded desktop, again with no AV at boot (have MBAM free I use only if needed)

msconfig.jpg (50.28 KiB) Viewed 37519 times

I should actually kill GeForce experience while I'm at it

[Major_A]

He probably loads AIDA for hardware monitoring and/or the Sensor Panel. If you've never done this before I'd recommend you do Disk Cleanup and delete Windows Update Cleanup. I did this on my mom's computer while at her place on Thanksgiving and it cleaned up close to 30GB of junk. The less space used on an SSD the better the performance.

[Kaos Kid]

I do use AIDA64 for monitoring of just about everything (temps, fan speeds, wifi speeds, mem usage, all sorts of stuff at a glance), my OSD windows stretches from top to bottom. I do use Malwarebytes Pro also, I like to use it for malicious website blocking among other things (has kept me out of trouble a few times while surfing). I did change my Comodo settings from "On Access" to "Stateful" perhaps that may help a little. I use the update cleanup also, last time I only had 3GB of junk. I currently have 74GB free of 111GB (120GB SSD). I do now need to troubleshoot an error with my event log viewer, it shows as unavailable, the service is shutoff and denies access when I try to restart it, something is locking me out, may need to change some permissions. Has happened before, I don't remember what it was the last time so I just have to Google it and see what the most common cause is and go from there. I did a restore back to the middle of November to see if it was something that caused it recently, no dice so now I get to muck around and find a solution. Good thing I did all my yard work yesterday lol. Oh well, lunch is ready--Pizza and troubleshooting, what a nerdasaurus I am