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SATA-III ports in Area-51?
Anyone knows if there are any SATA-III ports on the Area-51 system. I Googled and searched the forums but the answers differ; some are saying only a few ports are SATA-III, others are saying none. I'm considering getting an Intel 520 SSD to maximise performance but I don't want to waste my money if I know that the optimal results cannot be achieved. The tech specs stated on http://www.dell.com/us/p/alienware-area51/pd and the manual mentions nothing about the SATA specifications on the hard disk bays either.
My PC specifications are as follows: (ordered/manufactered on 9th September 2011)
Intel Core i7 990x Extreme Six Core Processor (3.46GHz, 12MB Cache)
6GB Triple Channel 1333MHz DDR3
Dual 1.5 GB GDDR5 NVIDIA Geforce GTX580 - SLI Enabled
1TB - SATA-II, 3Gb/s, 7,200RPM, 32MB Cache HDD
Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
USB 3.0 Interface Card
(No information about the 6 bays on the right side for drives)
Appreciate anyone who knows the answer to shed some light.
morblore
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August 15th, 2012 02:00
Hello Melvin612,
The Area 51 only supports Sata II.
Melvin612
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August 15th, 2012 02:00
Wow this is insightful. So I'll just get the SSD first and enjoy it. Thank you so much for your time. :D
morblore
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August 15th, 2012 02:00
Looking at your config again what you would need to do to keep your 580 SLI and 3.0 USB card is move one 580 to the bottom x16 slot. That will open up both the 1x and x16 slot. I ran my system like this for a while but I had a sound card and a TV card in the middle slots.
Melvin612
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August 15th, 2012 02:00
Thanks for answering my question so swiftly. Do you, however, recommend that I get a PCI Express SATA-III card/ controller to achieve better speeds?
morblore
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August 15th, 2012 02:00
If you really want the SATA 3 speed then there are a couple things you could do and getting a SATA III card like you mentioned is an option.
The first thing would be running two drivers in raid-0. It should cap out at about 600mb/s with the on-board controller.
The other option would be using a PCIe SATA 3 expansion card. Just make sure that if you do this that you read the specs. Some can be misleading and will say something like SATA 3 support. What that means is yes a SATA 3 drive will work but it will only run at SATA 2 speeds. You will also want to try to find one that uses a 4x slot and not a x1 slot. It's been my experience that a x1 slot will max out around 460gb/s or so which is shy of SATA 3 speeds of 600mb/s but close to the performance of many SATA 3 SSD's . A 4x card will give you the full SATA 3 speeds.
Just remember that no matter what you decide to do you will not really see the difference between SATA 2 and SATA 3 because SSD's have no seek time and thats what really matters. Everything will be instant unless you are into benchmarking or video editing. Then you may notice the speed difference, maybe.
Melvin612
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August 15th, 2012 05:00
I'll take that into consideration when if I resort to buying in the end. Either ways, do you know of any motherboards which are compatible with AlienFX? I heard that a replacement would cause the lights to fail.