SSD on SATA 2

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venm11

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I'm planning to add an SSD an older laptop with *only* SATA 2. Obviously that will limit max throughput to ~250MB/s or so, though IOPs will be unchanged.

But, here's my question. I noticed that SSDs can consume a bit more power (up to 2x) than traditional spinny drives, and have seen a number of complaints about heat. Are the processor clocks based on the SATA link speed, and would you thus see a significant drop in peak watts using SATA 2?

The drive is an 840 evo. Should I consider flipping it for an 850?
 
The 840 Evo will automatically start throttling itself if the temperatures get too high. Overall the SSD should use less than a 2.5" hard drive. The internal components of the SSD also aren't tied to the SATA link speeds.
 
SSD's typically use 50% or less power than standard mechanical drives. resulting in a significant battery boost in Laptops. Slap the Evo in the Laptop, you will NOT regret the move.
 
The 840 EVO is a bit odd in that regard. It seems that the internal logic does some flash housekeeping from time to time, during this phase the consumption rises even when there are nearly no host operations.
The only indicator I had was the temperature, the drive got hotter during than time than during heavy writing or reading from the host. It was over after a few minutes

The drive should not overheat during this phase, the firmware prevents that. The interface speed should have no influence, as the internal operations do not depend on the host link.
Outside of these phases the drive has a very low consumption, one of the best SSDs around in that regard. I would not replace it.
I don't think that you will have a significant gain in battery life by replacing that drive by an 850 EVO.
 
No this had nothing to do with the slowdown. It was a phase without any significant host accesses. This drive was filled with new data, less than a week old. I assume it was the garbage collection working.
 
venm11 said:
I'm planning to add an SSD an older laptop with *only* SATA 2. Obviously that will limit max throughput to ~250MB/s or so, though IOPs will be unchanged.

But, here's my question. I noticed that SSDs can consume a bit more power (up to 2x) than traditional spinny drives, and have seen a number of complaints about heat. Are the processor clocks based on the SATA link speed, and would you thus see a significant drop in peak watts using SATA 2?

The drive is an 840 evo. Should I consider flipping it for an 850?
Click to expand...

Err... what? Where'd you get that particular bit of information? SSDs on use less power than a spinner on average, what with not having to spin the platters. There's always exceptions though. (one insane Intel drive with a skull on it comes to mind)
When I dropped some OCZ refurb I got cheap in the laptop battery life went up a bit.

Personally i'd say stay away from the 840 EVOs though, what with the ongoing speed problems some are still suffering from. The Crucial MX100 drives are supposed to be rather good performers. Their read speeds suffer a bit compared to others but that obviously won't matter much on SATA2.
 
I had a Samsung 830 128GB in an old i5-540M laptop with SATA2. Replaced a 320GB 7200rpm spinner. Night and day difference. Very quick boot speed, instantaneous application/game loads, Windows updates installed in seconds instead of minutes... Really not much perceivable difference in a laptop with SATA3. Blazing fast, regardless of the interface link speed.
 
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