Maximum PC

I have an AMD 955 Phenom BE overclocked, everything on the system is SATA II.

Bought a SATA III SSD and figured the SATA II system I am running is bottlenecking my new SSD so I bought a PCIE Controller Card that has 2 SATA III ports on it, hoping to get in on that PCIE bandwidth.

When I download a large file thru the SATA II MOBO, the speed jumps up fast to it's max whereas when the SSD is plugged into the controller card, it slowly crawls up to it's max speed. It finally gets there, to the large bandwidth but takes much longer. Is there anything I am doing wrong?? I have the latest drivers installed on the controller card.

I guess it comes down to chipset. A SATA II runs faster on a $200 MOBO than a SATA III does on a $20 controller card. Please let me know if there is anything I can do, at least I have two more ports for regular hard drives for storage.

I discovered an option in BIOS for my PCIE. There were two, both were for PCIE and the options were either X1 Mode or X8 Mode. Does anyone know what this means and what it would mean to change them? They are currently at X1 Mode.

I assume it increases the lanes of info from 1 to 8 but I know nothing. Would adjusting this help my PCIE controller cards operate faster??

In theory, no, it should not have any affect on an x1 card... However, based on your observations from the other thread you opened (Need BIOS Help w/PCIE... which should have been added to this thread instead of opening a new thread since it's directly related...) it seems that theory & actuality may be different... might be interesting to see some in-depth testing with various add-in cards & motherboards.

Only thing I can think of that might explain your findings, perhaps the motherboard is defaulting to PCI-E 1.1 cutting the bandwidth to 250MB/sec, & by opting to change BIOS to x8 it's also changing the PCI-E from 1.1 spec to 2.0 spec.

BTW... from limited data I've seen on the ASMedia 1061 chipset (& none of it from "trusted" sources), the chipset seems to operate at about 350MB/sec - 400MB/sec, 150-200MB/sec slower than the onboard AMD or Intel SATA III chipsets, and making it marginally faster than an Intel or AMD SATA II controller.

About five months ago, I was in the exact same situation as you are right now. When I bought a SandForce 2281-based SATA III SSD, I also bought a generic Asmedia 1061-based SATA III PCIe x1 controller card to take advantage of the speed, since my AMD motherboard has only SATA II ports. To my surprise, it made little/no difference whatsoever, both performance- and benchmark-wise. So, I just resold it on eBay, as I had no need for the extra SATA ports.

So as much as I wanted to believe people actually conform to bus standards, I found out that some manufacturer's don't. My motherboard has four SATA 3 ports, two are native to the Intel chipset one is is an add-on chip by Marvell. At one time I had my SSD in the Marvell controller, and it was topping out at around lower 300MB/s, a far cry from the rated 550MB/s. I switched over to the native one, and welp, now I got 550MB/s.

So moral of the story: don't buy generic/no-name brand crap ever.