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- HOTNESS UNHOT
Newegg has the HighPoint Rocket 620-OEM PCI-Express 2.0 x1 Low Profile SATA III (6.0Gb/s) Controller Card for $25 - $5 off with coupon code EMCJHHG96 - $15 rebate [Exp 12/31] = $5 with free shipping. Features two SATA 6.0Gb/s ports and supports Native Command Queuing.
$5
I am a bit confused. SATA III is good for 600mb/second. There are 2 ports. The interface is pci-e 2 x1. That is good for 500mb/second. So 600*2 is well over twice 500mb/second. Even at SATA II speeds, that would work out to 300*2 > 500. A single cheap SSD can easily do more than 500mb/second.
My 8 port LSI SAS (3gb/sec) controller is pci-e x8. That allows 250mb/sec for each port. It was designed before SSDs were around.
Who is highpoint trying to fool? This might make a decent SATA II card, but is useless for SATA III drives.
And 23% gave it one egg, and the average is 3 eggs. Do the math.
No #1, not useless at all. The majority of transfers made on an SSD (outside of synthetic benchmarks) do not average over 500MB/s, and the majority of I/O is going to result in a difference of only a few milliseconds - less time than a human can perceive.
Otherwise the processor has to deal with the data beyond one-off bulk data transfers, and will be the bottleneck rather than the PCIe lane limit.
How much did you pay for that 8 port LSI card? Bet it was a dozen times as expensive, the point of this card is to be able to use a PCIe x1 slot as many motherboards don't have a spare x8 slot once you add a video card.
The main issue with this card is the same as with most, that there may be compatibility issues with certain chipsets, bios settings, and drive firmwares. Generally it's good to flash a card to the latest firmware when possible.