SATA III add-in cards? Know a good one?

[alex666]

I'm installing a sata III ssd (Kingston HyperX 120G, into my i7 system that does not have sata III and was wondering about a good simplye sata III add-in card. Anyone know of one? I am not interested in RAID. I see a few listed from Highpoint et al, just wondering if anyone has experience with one. Thanks.

marty

[Nightowl224]

There are cards that use the Marvell 9123, 9128 or 9130 chips. If you get one of those cards, avoid using the Marvell drivers, the Marvell drivers are horrible. I have the ASUS U3S6, which uses the Marvell 9123 chip, and have learned not to use the Marvell drivers and the card also has USB 3 on it.

Highpoint uses the Marvell SATA 3 chip on pretty much all their SATA 3 cards.

Syba has the ASMEDIA SATA 3 chip on some of their cards, and ASMEDIA is owned by ASUS.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16816124040

I have the Crucial C300 128 SATA III SSD in my system.

[alex666]

Thanks for the response. But I realize that I don't need an add-in card as there are two sata III ports on my mobo that I've never used, as I did not have a drive for them. So I can use them. But thanks for the input.

marty

[rdgrimes]

I'm only familiar with the Sandforce based SSDs. But in general the advice is to stay away from the Marvell chips if you want the best performance and reliability.

Most secondary SATA controllers on MBs are the same Marvell chips.

[Nightowl224]

Don't use the Marvell drivers, they crashed my system last year about this time and I ended up having to reinstall Windows 7, instead let Windows 7 or Vista, install the MSAHCI driver.

I'm using my U3S6 card even though it has the Marvell 9123 chip on it, until I do an upgrade to the X79 chipset and cpu's, and then I won't even need it anymore.

[alex666]

Well, my drive is coming today. Last night, I enabled the GSATA channels, which do use a marvell chip. I have only one Sata III drive, a 1TB Black Caviar, and the system would restart and freeze up most of the time before evn booting into windows when the Caviar was attached to either of the GSATA inputs. If I attached other drives to the GSATA inputs, no problem, and the Caviar attached to Intel Sata II inputs works fine. So there is something very weird with that GSATA system. Very disappointed. Realistically, I know that I won't see that much real world difference, but it's frustrating to have a portion of my mobo not work correctly. I've never attached anything to these GSATA inputs before. I had to remove my video card to even get to them, they are in a terrible location.

Oh well, the Kindston HyperX arrives today. I just spent a week with a Vertex 3 that kept blue screening on me. I did two fresh installs, the first I got BSODs right away, the second I was much more careful about the order in which I installed my drivers, and I was having great success, no BSODs, awesome speed, and then out of the blue, BSODs. Fortunately, I was able to get the retailer from whom I purchased the drive to give me an RMA for a refund, as I did n to want to mess around with a replacement from OCZ.

marty