SATA 3.0 controller card
November 2nd HighPoint Released Two SATAIII Controller cards; the Rocket 620 internal SATA 3.0 PCIe 2.0 1x card and the other The Rocket 622 eSATA 3.0 PCIe 2.0 1x controller card for external SATAIII drives.
Combined with Seagate's Barracuda XT 2TB SATA3 internal drive Promises large and fast storage with sustained speed of up to 500MB/s which could transfer a full DVD in about 9.5 seconds
One technical issue I see with the controller cards is the difference in speed of SATAIII and PCIe 2.0 1x. SATA3 has a theoretical maximum of 6Gb/s (768MB/s) vs PCIe 2.0 1x which is a theoretical maximum of 4Gb/s (500MB/s) or a loss of 2Gb/s (268MB/s) That makes the controller cards only 1Gb/s (128MB/s) faster then a SATA 2.0 device.
I would question the benefit of the controller card on a price vs performance comparison. The Rocket 620 has an MSRP of $69.99 or $17.50 per Gb of speed
Edit: I just read a review that benchmarked the Barracuda XT 2TB drive with a motherboard with full native SATA3 support and compared it several SATA2 drives. The results were only a few seconds faster then the SATA2 drive. This is as expected as platter drives wont see much of a benefit from SATAIII without a larger cache; The big performance increase is expected with SSD drives where SATAII is a limit on the speed of the SSD drive.
Yes, the Seagate's Barracuda XT 2TB SATA3 internal drive is the fastest drive, but unless you have native motherboard support; the drive will be almost no better then an SATA2 drive of the same capacity.
My conclusion is to stay away from PCIe2 1x controller cards (wait for a PCIe 4x Controller card, where the controller card wont be limiting the SATA3 speed) Skip the Platter drives with SATA3 as the minuscule performance gain is not worth the extra cost.
The performance cost is SATA3 $50/Gb of speed vs SATA2 $66.66/Gb of speed but SATA3's performance increase is at a cost of $100/Gb of additional speed additionally the storage cost at SATA3 is $150/TB vs SATA2 at $100/TB
Combined with Seagate's Barracuda XT 2TB SATA3 internal drive Promises large and fast storage with sustained speed of up to 500MB/s which could transfer a full DVD in about 9.5 seconds
One technical issue I see with the controller cards is the difference in speed of SATAIII and PCIe 2.0 1x. SATA3 has a theoretical maximum of 6Gb/s (768MB/s) vs PCIe 2.0 1x which is a theoretical maximum of 4Gb/s (500MB/s) or a loss of 2Gb/s (268MB/s) That makes the controller cards only 1Gb/s (128MB/s) faster then a SATA 2.0 device.
I would question the benefit of the controller card on a price vs performance comparison. The Rocket 620 has an MSRP of $69.99 or $17.50 per Gb of speed
Edit: I just read a review that benchmarked the Barracuda XT 2TB drive with a motherboard with full native SATA3 support and compared it several SATA2 drives. The results were only a few seconds faster then the SATA2 drive. This is as expected as platter drives wont see much of a benefit from SATAIII without a larger cache; The big performance increase is expected with SSD drives where SATAII is a limit on the speed of the SSD drive.
Yes, the Seagate's Barracuda XT 2TB SATA3 internal drive is the fastest drive, but unless you have native motherboard support; the drive will be almost no better then an SATA2 drive of the same capacity.
My conclusion is to stay away from PCIe2 1x controller cards (wait for a PCIe 4x Controller card, where the controller card wont be limiting the SATA3 speed) Skip the Platter drives with SATA3 as the minuscule performance gain is not worth the extra cost.
The performance cost is SATA3 $50/Gb of speed vs SATA2 $66.66/Gb of speed but SATA3's performance increase is at a cost of $100/Gb of additional speed additionally the storage cost at SATA3 is $150/TB vs SATA2 at $100/TB
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Downside: If you don't have a PCIe2 x4 slot you'll have to use a PCIe2 x16 slot, and if you only have one PCIe2 x16 slot say goodbye to PCIe2 x16 Video cards.
Asus Launching USB 3.0 PCI-E Card for $30
Yes, I do think that Asus thought it through. They could have used a different PCIe bridge controller card that would have been only 1x, they chose the PLX. This is likely so neither the USB3 or the SATA3 data would run risks of exceeding the bandwidth.
I suggested X4 as a logical choice for a SATA3 Controller card because it is next standard in mechanical slots and pcie x4 has bandwidth to spare for SATA3.
Based on your statement that each side of the card USB3 and SATA3 only get PCIe x2. This would give a data rate of 2x4Gb/s or 8Gb/s (2x500 MB/s or 1GB/s) which exceeds the theoretical maximum of SATA3 at 6Gb/s (768MB/s)