[Solved] Adding another SATA III port

Can someone please tell me how to connect an additional SATA III port to my GA-X58A-UD7 motherboard. I purchased a SSD and would like to use a SATA III port for it. The problem is that I have the two(SATA III ports) on the board, already occupied by two other drives. I was thinking of installing this controller card, but I am unsure of where/how to install it- HighPoint Rocket 620a Serial ATA Controller 2 Serial ATA/600 Thanks for any info!

The highpoint installs in a pci-e slot. It's designed for a x1 slot but will fit/work in any available slot. Just install it, install drivers, connect drive and go.

If you have 2x mechanical drives on the Sata 6Gb/s ports you could move one of them to a Sata 3Gb/s controller. It'd suffer no performance penalty as mechanical drives do not saturate the bandwidth.

Another thing to keep in mind is that Highpoint is going to cap at pci-e x1 speeds which is 500Mb/s * .8 (8b/10b encoding) = 400Mb/s. Many current SSDs will saturate this entirely. It's not a huge deal and probably not something I'd drop $150 on one of the x2/x4 cards to fix.

If you plan on adding additional SSDs and/or RAID0 setups you might consider something like the Rocket Raid 2720 SGL $159.99 as it supports up to 8 drives via SAS expanders and does so on an x8 lane.

It's 6Gbp/s vs 550MBp/s.

Bits vs Bytes. 6 gigabits = 768 megabytes. 3 gigabits (3Gb/s) = 384 megabytes.

So, a 550 megabyte SSD would saturate a 3Gb/s lane easily.

a4mula, I decided against the SATA card. The D and E drives seem to work quite well in the SATA II ports. Clearly, switching the C drive to one of the two SATA III ports was the way to go! Thanks for all the good info/advice!

azbytes