Figured I'd check here first before dumping money into this. Up until buying a 90GB OCZ Vertex SSD that supports 6GB/s SATA III speed, I was totally satisfied with my setup running quickly on SATA II 3GB/s with regular 7200RPM 500GB Seagate Drive. My system is now running still off of the 500GB SATA II drive and I am using my SSD that is capable of SATA III 6GB/s speed, at the backwards compatible SATA II 3GB/s speed and this drive is my gaming drive that runs as slave to my 7200RPM drive that is master. Game load times and performance is way better/faster on this SSD such as World of Warcraft load times and transition times porting from place to place with map loading etc.
Knowing that I "could" get even faster performance with 6GB/s vs the 3GB/s that I am currently running is very tempting to spend money and run for the speed and take full advantage of that SSD's abilities vs running it at 1/2 of its speed.
In order to get this 6GB/s speed of SATA III I will have to replace my motherboard as for I dont have an available PCIe slot for a SATA III drive controller card, and I read somewheres online someone stating that the PCIe expansion slot with SATA III controller card max's out at 5GB/s due to limited bandwidth of the PCIe slot.
Here is my hardware:
Motherboard = BioStar MCP6PB M2+
CPU = Athlon II x4 620 ( 2.6Ghz Quad ) AM3
Ram = DDR2 800Mhz ( 4GB, but only 3GB usable with this OS )
OS = Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit
Slots= 1 PCIe 16x ( Video Card ), 2 normal PCI slots 1 of 2 populated with 2nd NIC
PSU = Cooler Master 460 Watt
I am trying to figure out if its worth dumping money into this project to upgrade to 6GB/s SATA III from 3GB/s SATA II for about $120, as for I can only migrate my CPU and cards to the new motherboard which is an AM3+, but I'd have to replace my RAM with DDR3. The Ram upgrade to DDR3 from my 800Mhz Corsair DDR2 would also boost performance as well, but if I am not going to see close to 2x the speed of SATA II in this SSD drives performance at SATA III, I wont bother spending the money.
Thanks for help on making this decision..