Hi. I'm pulling my hair out and would definitely appreciate any help you might be able to provide... I just recently bought a 128gb Crucial C300 ssd (sata 3 capable). I don't have any sata 3 ports on my motherboard, so I bought a sata 3 card to accommodate the drive. I looked at both a Koutech brand and the highpoint rocket 620. I know they're not the best cards out there, but I was looking for a cheap solution. In any event, I wind up going with the koutech. However, I got pretty bad speeds when I set it up. I tried clean installs, updating drivers, etc., but I couldn't get seq speeds past 180 MB/s. I wound up hooking it up to my on-board sata 2 controller and got seq speeds of around 250 MB/s...much higher than the sata 3 card. So I decided to try out the highpoint. Both of these cards are pretty cheap, so I decided to give it a shot...thinking it might be the koutech card. Well, I just installed the highpoint, and I still can't get the seq speeds past 180MB/s. One thing I noticed when I went into the marvell bios at boot up (for both cards that I tried), is that it said PCIe speed rate: 2.5Gbps. My computer is fairly new (Dell Studio XPS 8100). I found the specs sheet for my computer online and it clearly says that the pci express ports are 2nd gen x1 slots. Aren't they supposed to run at 5.0Gbps? I'm thinking the pci-e slot must be the culprit somehow. I installed my O.S. (Windows 7) in AHCI mode. I checked my bios and there is nothing in there that looks like it could affect the pci-e slots. Any suggestions on getting my ssd speeds up into sata 3 range? -Many thanks
Either the specs are wrong & it's only a pcie 1.0 slot - in which case try a larger slot as these tend to be 2.0... ...or it's the random issue that some people got with these cards for no discernable reason that could be worked out on here & you'd get much better results using the onboard 3Gb/s intel controller. Otherwise, be circumspect about over b/ming as the card does not support trim & the GC on the C300 isn't great.
Dell Studio XPS 8100 = mATX board => in majority of the cases the graphics card slot gets all the 16 PCI-E lanes, the secondary PCI and PCI-E x1 slots get the PCI-E lanes from the southbridge, which unfortunately means PCI-E 1.x speeds. So yes, you won't get SATA3 speeds there. Dell Studio XPS 8100 = http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/studio8100/en/cs/cs_en.pdf = H57 chipset. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_chipsets#Core_i_Series_chipsets Unfortunately what they say is AFAIK technically impossible with H57 (but truth to be told, even Intel has this at 500MB/s while technically it is not true) : Edit: http://ixbtlabs.com/articles3/mainboard/i55h-57h-chipsets-p2.html
I see. For some reason, I thought I read that a firmware/driver update added trim support...i guess that's not true? Maybe I'm thinking of a c300 firmware update. Do both cards NOT support trim, or just the highpoint? I'm guessing they are both based on the same technology? I checked if trim is enabled by: fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify. It came back with 0 (enabled). I'm guessing that just means it's enabled in Windows? If it doesn't support trim, then I will gladly go back to my onboard sata 2 controllor. I think I'd rather have trim over the extra speeds of sata 3. Even on sata 2, it's still very fast in my opinion. Thanks very much for the response.
@faugusztin: Thank you so much for your response. Thank you for doing that research...and referencing it for me). Very knowledgeable and informative. That's really "stinky" (for lack of a harsher word :-> ), that they mislead you like that. In my opinion, they shouldn't show the slots as 500 MB/s in the spec sheet if they're not going to operate at that speed in the real world. Oh well. At least I know now not to try any harder to get them to work. And for that info, I thank you.
