GA-H55M-UD2H and PCIe to SATA 3.0 Adapter

[bifter]

Hi,

I have a fairly straightforward question but that doesn't necessarily mean a straight-forward answer! The short question is will my MB support booting from a PCIe to SATA 3.0 expansion card?

The detail follows...

I have a GA-H55M-UD2H motherboard (F11 BIOS), i3 processor, 4GB RAM and a 60GB Kingston SSD. However OS space was getting tight so I've ordered a SanDisk Ultra II 120GB SSD which, of course, is SATA 3.0 with theoretical maximum speeds of 550MB/s read and 500MB/s write.

As the SATA ports on the MB are SATA 2.0 (3Gb/s) they are restricted to 250MB/s throughput. I researched a little and found that some people had used a PCIe to SATA 3.0 expansion card to squeeze a bit more out of their MBs. The GA-H55M-UD2H manual specifies that the GPU PCIe slot conforms to PCIe 2.0 and therefore has a theoretical maximum speed of 500MB/s each way. The BIOS also presents a HDD boot priority menu that lists 'bootable add-in cards'. However I haven't found any more information, e.g. about compatibility. The following card is only £8 so I thought it was worth a punt:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00L22W51C

Now the card has arrived, the SSD is still to be delivered but I thought I'd test the functionality with my existing SSD. I installed the card and installed the drivers in Windows so it appears to work as an expansion card (I don't have a spare SATA drive to test this). However when I reattached the system SSD SATA cable to the card and booted (with 'bootable add-in cards' selected first in the HDD boot priority menu) I got a no system disk error. The Windows install disk doesn't see the SSD either so I'm guessing it just isn't being picked up? Is there anything else I can try or is this just not going to work?

[dmdilks]

Does it see it in the Bios. If it doesn't see it in the Bios then you can't boot to it. If you have to add drivers to it in windows then it will not work in dos. By what I'm reading out there those cards are really no better then you just connecting the SSD to the sata ports.

I have a friend that has a EVGA 55 board with a SSD sata III with windows 10 on it and works just fine. Now you can connect extra drives to that card so you have room for you SSD's.

[bifter]

Thanks for the reply. I bought the card as I was encouraged by the option in the BIOS boot priority menu to select 'Bootable add-in cards', what can that mean if not that you can use the expansion slots to attach bootable devices? I haven't found any further information about what kind of devices can be booted from, but a controller/adapter for SSDs or HDDs would be the obvious conclusion.

Some reviewers report speeds of up to 380MB/s using this card and that it works natively with their MB. My MB seems to be at the highest firmware revision so I'm guessing it just isn't going to work with this HW, I just thought I'd check here in case anyone has any suggestions.

[dmdilks]

Ok did you look at the reviews for that card from the link you put up. If your MB doesn't boot from a Add-on card it will not work sorry. I could be wrong but the book for your MB it has no option for that.

[bifter]

Well, the new SSD arrived and, oddly enough it's seen in the boot priority menu when attached to the PCIe card (SanDisk SDSSDHII120GB). I'm guessing this is just a HW compatibility issue, a bit weird though to be honest. As far as speeds go the initial comparison between disks is encouraging (though Windows was installing updates to the new drive at the time):

Kingston SVP200S360


SanDisk SDSSDHII120GB


I guess some of these figures wouldn't be achievable using the SATA 2.0 interface. How much of a real world noticeable difference this makes remains to be seen. Anyway thanks for the responses and advice.

[dmdilks]

The bad thing is the adapter card only uses 1 line. That is why the read / write speed are like that.