I recently upgraded to a new SSD, the OCZ Agility 3. It gave really good speeds, but I couldn’t help but feel that I was limiting it by putting it in a motherboard which only had 3 Gbps SATA II ports.
I bought a Lycom PE115 6Gbps SATA III adapter, and put it in a PCIe 2.0 port, but when I benchmarked the drive with CrystalDiskMark, on an idle Windows 7 x64 machine (Dual Xeon E5620, 8GiB ECC-R 1333MHz) the results were very disappointing.
Not only was there no improvement over the port on the motherboard, the dedicated 6Gbps SATA III card was actually significantly slower than the 3 Gbps SATA II port (roughly 64% of the speed).
I tried without and then with the drivers for the card installed, and it made no real difference.
Fill 0
The blue bar is on the motherboard’s SATA 3Gbps.
The red bar is on the PE115′s SATA 6Gbps
The yellow bar is the PE115 with drivers manually installed.
The green bar is back on the motherboard, to confirm it.
The results show that the PE115 consistently performs significantly worse than the motherboard in both fill 0×00 (above) and fill random (below) operations.
Fill Random
All of this was done in CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64.
