So I figured a final (most likely) update re: how the underlying hardware platform impacts the final performance. Yeah, I mean we all know and get it, but in my case I have now tested 3 separate hardware solutions so it's kind of neat to see the difference (or lack thereof).
Anyways, without further ado, I now have the MSI 890FXA-GD70 board up and running...ha ha..."upgrade" eh? Well, it's ancient history by today's hardware standard; yes, the Ryzen stuff is still out there, but if you recall I was looking to max out the performance of my Samsung 850 SSD, and it being a SATA3 drive and being held-back by my SATA2 interface on the previous motherboard clearly wasn't allowing me to do so.
So the new board sports a SATA3 interface, it also finally lets me boot my Phenom II X6 CPU with the full 6-cores up and running (separate post on that b/c I'm seeing continuous CPU spikes).
1) SysBench results for the SSD
Disk I/O disk 0-2: 238473 MB - WSamsung SSD 850 EVO 250GB
Avg. data access time : --.--- milliseconds
Cache/Bus xfer rate : 206.859 Megabytes/second
Track 0 xfer rate fwd : 387.066 Megabytes/second
Middle trk rate fwds. : 392.029 Megabytes/second
Last track rate bwds. : 369.462 Megabytes/second
Average Transfer rate : 382.853 Megabytes/second
Disk use CPU load : 14.320 percent
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Total : --.--- Disk I/O-marks
2) diskio results
DISKIO - Fixed Disk Benchmark, Version 1.18z
(C) 1994-1998 Kai Uwe Rommel
(C) 2004 madded2
Number of fixed disks: 6
Number of CD-ROM drives: 1
Dhrystone 2.1 C benchmark routines (C) 1988 Reinhold P. Weicker
Dhrystone benchmark for this CPU: 3060618 runs/sec
Hard disk 2: 255 sides, 30401 cylinders, 63 sectors per track = 238472 MB
Drive cache/bus transfer rate: 130038 k/sec
Data transfer rate on cylinder 0 : -105937 k/sec
Data transfer rate on cylinder 30399: -128616 k/sec
CPU usage by full speed disk transfers: 38%
Average data access time: Disk read error.
Multithreaded disk I/O (4 threads): Disk read error.
3 k/sec, 27% CPU usage
So diskio is a little off (problems with the hardware speed I think), but SysBench does show some clear improvement. I think the results are in-line with what one might expect from a SATA2 to SATA3 move for a storage device that is capable of utilizing that speed.