Thinkin' about a Crucial M4 SSD, but my desktop is Old. Does anyone make a PCI card for SATA III (6Gbps). Not PCIe.
I can't use a PCIe (PCI Express) card. My Mobo's too old.
Posted Apr 29, 2011, 12:57 AM UTC
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There's absolutely no point putting even SATA 2 on a PCI bus, unless it's one of the faster 3.3v PCI variants (32/66 PCI is good for 266MB/s across the entire bus, 64/66 PCI is good for 533, and some PCI-Xs get up over 1GB/s.)
I'm guessing your mobo doesn't have any 66MHz or 64 bit PCI slots?
As an unrelated side-note, for a while, x1 SATA cards were hard to come by and PCI ones were the only way to get more ports short of paying serious bucks for a SAS HBA -- they all, without fail, fucking suck. The VIA VT6421 that everybody seems to like has issues with concurrent port access in its linux driver (unsure about how that one works in Windows) and the various ALi/ULI/SIS ones seem even flakier.
For SSD money, you could get a pretty convincing motherboard/CPU upgrade.
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I've got lots of spare parts, what cpu/mobo/ram do you have now?
Edit: After reading this post I got an idea for a freecycle buildapc subreddit. See here.
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Don't do it. You need a brand new motherboard to take advantage of an SSD.
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Thanks for your help, guys!
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Isn't max bandwidth 133MB/sec which is just over 1.0Gb/sec? Not even fast enough for original sata.
Correct...came here to say this.
Yup. It would be a waste putting in a SSD on a rig like this.
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It would be faster than an IDE drive, right?
Sure, if you can find a controller card that works. I'd look for a scsi controller for a system that old and a used drive.