sata III controller card
 

Can anyone recommend me a good sata 3 controller card. Building a system for the woman on a 775 platform and the mobo only supports sata II. I would like to get her a blazing fast SSD or give her my m4 and be able to use it to it's full potential.

Any card with a Marvell or ASmedia should do it. But I would go Marvell. The issue is : is the mobo supporting PCI Ex 1.0 or 2.0? Because if it is 1.0 and the controller is only 1 lane you will be limited to around 200-210 MB/s so no SATA III speeds. Me, I have this issue and I overcame it by using the Asus U3S6 which is a 4 lanes card.

i wouldn't worry about it. most sata cards don't have abilities to be booted from either. just hook it up to a sata 2 port and call it a day.

Hmm I'm not too sure. The motherboard is ASUS P5G41T-M LX. Expansion slots are 1 x PCIe x16, 1 x PCIe x1,
2 x PCI.


16x is 2.0 correct? and 1x is 1.0?

Sorry still learning. :P

Is the ASUS U3S6 bootable?

Damn that sucks. Looks like I might just have to find an older slower SSD for her. :P OR sell this old crap tech and get some new stuff babhahahahhaha

Even with a PCIe specification 2.0 board, a x1 slot will still be slower than the specified speed for SATA III though in practical terms should not be much of an impact if only using one drive. The U3S6 has the Marvel sata chipset and uses only has 1x PCIe 2.0 link and a PLX bridge chip to covert it to a PCI-E 4x card. The USB 3 is also limited to 1x PCIe 2.0 link as well. Those 2 chips share the 4x PCIe links bandwidth so it would be easy to bottleneck the card. And yes it is bootable though some have reported a minor struggle to get to do so with some hardware configurations.

YES, it is. And most beautiful thing if you install Win7? is not even asking for a driver!

That mobo still has pci ex 1.0, so it will be limited. I think enaberif doesn't have much experience with add in cards, I had 3, all bootable, 1 with Silicon Image 3132, 1 with Silicon Image 3124 and the Marvel 9123 from Asus U3S6.

The U3S6 has 4 lanes, divided equally for the USB 3.0 chip and the other 2 for the Marvell controller. The 2 lanes allocated for the Marvell chips are not shared equally however, they are allocated dynamically, and I say that because I reached 327MB/s while testing my SATA III SSD, while a single pciex 1.0 lane has only 250MB/s and that is including the overhead which is like 20%, so the real transfer bandwith of a single lane on pciex 1.0 is around 210MB/s.