Storage PCIe SSD + extra SATA adaptor?..

SEDNA - PCI Express (PCIe) SATA III (6G) SSD Adapter with 1 SATA III port

Found one of these and was thinking that might be a good upgrade for one of my old LGA 775 systems to go on to an SSD ( which hasn't got AHCI support ), but first would like to get some feedback from you good folks on whether you think this is a good idea or not and why I should or should not consider one of these?..

Love to hear the comments from you all!.. Thanks...

 

nice find, I've never seen one like this so I'm interested in the performance.

 

It's probably Marvell based so it'll perform the same as a generic SATA 3.0 adapter, which means it'll be marginally faster than native SATA 2 in benchmarks but feel exactly the same.

Edit: Found this:



That's using their software that uses the SSD as a cache, like the SSHD hybrid drives.

 

I'm not that bothered much about the speeds and performance as with all SSDs no matter what is gonna be so much faster than a conventional HDD in all everyday computing use!.. I'm more concerned with having trim, garbage control, and other SSD features under Windows 7/8!.. I'm hoping this adaptor will sport these features or this will be a no goer!..

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I also needed something like this but I got one of the msata type. I put a mushkin atlas in it and I get the best performance that ssd has to offer with full speeds and trim.

 

Yeah, but I don't have a spare mSATA SSD drive anywhere lying around in my stash LOL

 

i am confident that you won't have either trim or unmap (it might be detected as a scsi controller) with this...

Using windows (i believe only 8.1 & above), it's only the upcoming nvme SSDs that will support deallocate (aka trim)... ...whereas trim simply doesn't get passed to a SSD via any pcie controller, & i've never seen any evidence that unmap was ever actually gotten working in windows.


GC, conversely, is part of a SSD's internal workings, & all you need for that to work is power going to the SSD.


A better bet, imho, would almost certainly be to look for a 2nd hand 775 board on eBay that does support ahci - which, off the top of my head, would be things like the P45 & X48 boards (there's also later ones like the ASUS P5G41 boards) with the ich9r or ich10r controller - as you'd probably need to pay no more but end up with a much better solution.

in what way have you come to the conclusion that trim's working?

if you've just used the fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify command prompt option then this tells you nothing other than that Windows will attempt to send the trim command to any SSDs - not that it's actually reaching the SSD...

...so unless you're using some other OS that does properly support trim/unmap over pcie then i'm confident that you're mistaken.

Whilst i can't personally vouchsafe for its results either which way (simply as i've never used it) you could try testing with trimcheck.

Naturally though, as the Atlas is a SF based SSD then it will be inherently more robust in a non-trim environment than a non-SF - so, unless you're hammering the thing, leaving minimal free space &/or no idle time for GC to kick in, it should look after itself much more reliably than if you'd bought something else.

i think i went mad earlier...

The issue is with the ASMedia controller & it's own drivers, post 1.3.4, where there's numerous reports of trim not working with most/all of the later releases.

Provisionally, it seems that it would using either that driver or the msachi one in Win 7/8 may well allow trim - though, having just had a quick look, i can't find any confirmation on whether it's firmware dependent or not.

That said, unless you've a usage that highly prioritises sequential r/ws, you'd still get better overall results by swapping the motherboard & using the 3Gb/s intel ports from either a ich9r or ich10r on board controller - with the latest 12.9.0.1001 irst driver.

 

Very interesting read!..

Looks like I'll be re-thinking my strategy for this little machine of mine!.. I'm not gonna go down the replacing the motherboard route as it would just add more components to my spare stash anyways LOL I think I might just get a cheapo RAID card with windows 7/8 ( if I can find one cheaply though ) and stick in a couple of HDDs in raid 0 mode...

 

Because the ASMedia ASM1061 controller supports trim. If an ssd can't receive the trim commands it is unavailable in Windows 8/2012 defrag and optimize. There are a few chips that support trim these days as 3rd party onboard chips or add on cards over pci-e. Even a few of the pure pci-e ssd models can do trim these days.

In any case, if you have a 2.5" ssd about, you should check to make sure the card has the asmedia chips as they are much better performers than the marvel.

 

Thanks for the intel, I'll have look in to the controller chip some time later...

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