SSD Hard Drive Benchmarking Testing and Tuning - Part II

So, it's been a whole 30 minutes since I published my last blog and I already have the answers I was seeking. As many of you fellow bloggers know, the act of writing something down, thinking it through, and revisiting it even a few minutes later grants great clarity. 


I had the idea after posting and tweeting that the bus speed of the SATA 3 controller card might not be enough. The market on Amazon and NewEgg is littered with controllers that are PCI Express 1x. I started looking at posts, and speeds on this port and sure enough, that is what my new drive was topping out at. 


The on board SATA 2 controller didn't have that limitation so it was able to go faster. My options are to find a controller card that is more than 1x so it has more bandwidth or to update my motherboard to one that has SATA 3 on board. If I'm going to do that, I might as well upgrade everything. Given that I'm a every three years upgrade kind of guy, I'm going to sit tight, live it with it, and wait until this time next year. 


Standards are always changing and technology is always evolving. I'm patient enough with my money to know that I'll have many more options and the costs will be cheaper if I wait. For now, I'm going to appreciate my disk score in WEI going from 5.9 to 7.8. That is after all a pretty huge leap. 


I went down the road of reviewing how many slots my motherboard has and while there are three of the PCI Express 2.0 slots, it can either work in the mode of 16x16x0, 16x0x16 (My configuration), or 16x8x8. This means that if I wanted to tap into that third slot, I'd hurt my video card performance. While I don't game on all for of my monitors at once, I do want to keep them all optimal as I do occasionally flip on SLI and turn on 3D. 


The cards that I could put into my machine where in the price range of over $200 and up to $800. That is just too much even for this nerd and enthusiast. I wish I had better news to report but it is, what it is. I'm pretty happy but in reality, I could have save about 30 bucks getting the normal version and not worrying about GT. I wish that the drive manufacturers would release more real work information but I also understand why they wouldn't. 


As a side note, I'll be honest and say that I didn't know that the total bandwidth among the PCI Express 2.0 ports was limited and you couldn't do 16x per port. I had an eSata controller card plugged into my middle one which was robbing one of my video cards and keeping it at 8x instead of the full 16x it should have been. I swapped that into the 1x slot that I vacated by ganking the SATA 3.0 card to keep it at max. I see no use in the SATA 3.0 card if the 2.0 has more bandwidth and I have the available slots. I'm sure you would agree.