SSD SATA III Compatibility

[Larkina]

I'm currently using the Gigabyte GAEP45-UD3P v1.6 motherboard and I was wondering before purchasing an SSD SATA III drive if it is compatible and if not what would be the best SSD drive to use with this particular motherboard. Thank you in advance for helping.

[Dark Mantis]

Hi and welcome.

The thing is you can use a SATA3 SSD  but you wont get the full performance out of it with this motherboard as the SATA3 ports don't work properly on it. That said you will still get a tremendous speed boost and it will be usefull when you finally upgrade. The best port to use if you do instal one is the SATA2_0 as I am assuming you would use it as a boot drive.

[Larkina]

Thank you for the reply Dark Mantis. Yes I would put the OS on the SSD and the infomation on a regular 3.5 SATA hard drive. Using this as a boot drive you say that it would increase my overall system's performance all around? If I might ask how would you go about executing placing the information on another drive. Thank for the response.

[Larkina]

Then again what if I bought 2 60Gb SSD II's and ran them in a RAID 0 configuration and used my regular 3.5 SATA hard drives in a RAID 0 also as backup?
Would I still get fantastic performance. The only drawback that I could think of is that I've heard it said the best performance is received when using the SSD in ACHI instead of RAID. What would you do? I never new there were so many things to consider when upgrading to SSD form 3.5 HDs.

[Dark Mantis]

Hi

The use of two SSDs as a RAID0 array would certaily be fast but what you are coming up against isn't the speed limitations of the drives but the controller. If you have a drive that can flood the controller and is using all the bandwidth it isn't going to help if you have half a dozen of them as they are not the limiting factor. I really wouldn't worry too much  as the performance is still going to be great compared to what you are used to.

The only way around your dilemma is to use a OCZ Revodrive x2. This fits into the x4 slot on the PCIE bus and as such can handle the extra throughput. I get roughly 650MBs write and 720MBs read which is roughly twice what you can expect from a SSD on your motherboard. If money is no object then you could even go for the Revo 3 x2 which is capable of roughly 1200MBs and 1500MBs respectively.

AHCI or RAID mode won't make the slightest difference so don't worry over that. The main downside to using RAID is that you won't be able to use TRIM to look after yopur drive for the long term.

As for the data drives , well you can use in RAID0 mode if you wish but generally if you are not using it to boot you are not going to notice the speed so much anyway.

[Larkina]

Okay, I understand now. Money is an option with me after looking at how much those OCZ Revodrives cost,LOL. My goodness. I guess you get what you pay for.
I think my best option is to do as you said using the SSD as a boot drive. Thank you so much Dark Mantis for helping me to understand this upgrade a great deal better.

[EyeDontKnow]

Hi and welcome.

The thing is you can use a SATA3 SSD  but you wont get the full performance out of it with this motherboard as the SATA3 ports don't work properly on it. That said you will still get a tremendous speed boost and it will be usefull when you finally upgrade. The best port to use if you do instal one is the SATA2_0 as I am assuming you would use it as a boot drive.

Why is SATA2 port better than SATA3 port ?
Is that a  recommendation for only some boards ?

I just installed windows on my Intel 510 SSD, on SATA_3.......seems to be working well ! (mobo : GA-Z68XP-UD3-iSSD)

[Dark Mantis]

Why is SATA2 port better than SATA3 port ?
Is that a  recommendation for only some boards ?

I just installed windows on my Intel 510 SSD, on SATA_3.......seems to be working well ! (mobo : GA-Z68XP-UD3-iSSD)

It depends what motherboard you have. From memory Larkina 's uses the X58 chipset which means that the SATA3 is supposed to be supported by the Marvell 9128 chip which was a failure as far as SATA3 performance went and hence the advice to use the faster SATA2 Intel ICH10R port of SATA2_0. I hope that is clear if not please ask again.