SATA 1/2 vs. 3/4

Question

Hi Guys,
I OC'ed my system (see below) to 240x11 with 1:1 mem/cpu, HTT 4x, 2.5-3-3-7-1T, 1.47vcore.  I couldn't get above this, despite trying looser timings, more voltage, etc., and then I read about the SATA 1/2 lock problem on the K8N Neo2.  I have SATA drives on 1/2, though I don't boot from either of them.  Sadly, I did eventually experience data corruption on channel 1 and had to reformat.
I've read in other forums that a northbridge SATA channel (1/2) is faster than an external channel (3/4) because it's native, whereas an external channel has to communicate with the chipset over the PCI bridge.  My question is, are the performance gains that I would get by switching to SATA 3/4 (enabling higher clocks) worth the hit I would take in data transfer?
Thanks for any advice!

Answer 1

There is none of the four sata ports that is connected to/run off the PCI bus .
The nforce 3 250 chipset by nvidia has physical layer (PHY) buildt in for 2 sata ports .
Some manufacturers call this ones 1&2 and some 3&4(MSI) .
The PHY intergrated ports are the two ones close to the AGP port and CPU socket on all NF3 250/ultra motherboards
this cause it's part of the nvidia reference design .
The NF3 chipset has a satalink bridge so mobo manufacturers can use an extrernal PHY for additional 2 sata ports , this PHY chip is by marvell in most cases .
The ports are still on-chip (nf3 chipset) integrated even if they use the marvell PHY chip .
The problem is that the chipset can't control the clock reference for the marvell PHY like it's internal PHY so the satalink frequency
of theese two marvell ports scale with the HTT clock .