Should I even bother with a SSD on SATA2?

WhiteZero

WhiteZero

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I'm not quite ready to upgrade my whole rig, but I'd possibly like to get a SSD in the mean time. My board has SATA2 (3Gbps) via Intel ICH9R chipset. It'll obviously be a massive speed improvement going to SSD, but will it be too much of a waste to not have it on SATA3?
 
I would not say it would be a waste. On sata 3gb/s, you will be getting about 2x the transfer speed of a velociraptor, like in your sig, and also better access times. It will be limited to only about 1/2 the speed a good ssd is capable of, but it would still be a very noticeable improvement. I'm running an M4 on sata 3gb/s now and am very pleased with the performance improvement vs my previous WD black drive. My wife has the same M4 ssd, but on a Z68 board, running sata 6gb/s, and while it does benchmark almost 2x faster than my setup in read speed, it doesn't really seem much more "snappy" to me in general use. Also, it's not like you can't reuse the ssd if/when you do get a 6gb/s cabable system.
 
Not a waste at all. In fact in most real world use cases, you will barely notice the difference between 3Gbps and 6Gbps.
 
Metaluna said:
Not a waste at all. In fact in most real world use cases, you will barely notice the difference between 3Gbps and 6Gbps.
Click to expand...

Agreed. Actually very few SSDs are fast enough to need SATA III speed when doing small random reads and writes so being on an SATA II controller does not hurt much in most real world applications that do not read and write MBs to GBs at a time sequentially.
 
Yeah, I just read this article on Toms Hardware. While the benchmarks are like 25% lower, the real world performance is almost identical.
 
Do RAID 0 of TWO SSD's and you will never look at Raptor again.
You will see huge performance increase.
 
A single SSD is a significant upgrade versus two RAID-0 raptors.

I strongly encourage anybody looking for an upgrade to go with an SSD.
 
Most of the time, as an OS drive you are doing high queue depth random access of the SSD, which doesn't even approach SATA150 limits, let alone SATA600.
 
I'm running an ssd on sata 1, and it died a few weeks ago, went back to a normal disk. It felt horrible. Back on an ssd again on my sata1 port on this laptop, and it feels ok again. For all purposes, sata1 is *enough* on this laptop, the only times I would benifit from higher speeds with the ssd is hibernation, and suspending vm images.
 
I switched from a mechanical drive to an Intel X25-M which is a SATA2 SSD, and the difference was night and day. Buy a current SSD that will saturate SATA3 and once you upgrade the rest of your system, the drive will come right along into that new build.

I still have yet to upgrade my SSD, as I doubt I will notice much of a speed increase in comparison to what I have now. The only reason I'll justify the upgrade to a newer SSD is for more storage capacity. Prices are falling and I'm in no rush, so I think the holiday season is when I'll upgrade it. :)
 
the only place where a ssd hasn't been a huge difference was in my atom based netbook. on my regular core2 based laptop, it's night & day with an m4.
 
WhiteZero said:
Yeah, I just read this article on Toms Hardware. While the benchmarks are like 25% lower, the real world performance is almost identical.
Click to expand...

Thats because all the magic when it comes to windows "responsiveness" is in the 4K random I/O.

For this reason alone an SSD is a massive upgrade even on SATA-II
 
I have had a few clients come to be with old laptops that I have been slapping Crucial M4 128gb drives in. I have to say I am really impressed at the speed difference. Boots are very fast and the OS is much more snappy. Considering this drive has been seen as low as 85$ its a hell of an upgrade even on an older SATA II controller.
 
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