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SSD with sataII is basically useless?

E

ep0x73

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300MB/host is the theoretical max and a Samsung EVO is closer to 400/500 so it would work but it would be held back.

Is this the basic consensus, you need III to get the full potential?
 
The rates you quote are peak speeds. You rarely reach (or need) the peak speeds. Obviously, how often you're near peak demand depends on your workload, and that varies for different people and different apps.

To me, "basically useless" means "doesn't work at all", and that's certainly not the case.
 
Your random access speeds for read and write will still be greatly improved with an SSD, even over SATA II.
 
I run a 830 pro on SATAII and trust me it is far from useless.
 
Useless? I've put SSDs into computers still using first-gen SATA before and it was still a huge improvement.

Max transfer speed isn't what makes SSDs feel fast, it's being able to access lots of things simultaneously that makes them fast. If you think about a regular hard drive, the read heads can only be in one place at once... that means as you access more things simultaneously, it doesn't just get slower, it gets exponentially slower. SSDs don't have that problem and that remains true regardless of max transfer speed.
 
300MB/host is the theoretical max and a Samsung EVO is closer to 400/500 so it would work but it would be held back.
Click to expand...

No 300 MB/s will not hold it back. in most applications including games 300MB/s will not in any way limit you because most applications do not read or write in large enough chunks to achieve SATA III speeds.
 
Useless might not have been the best choice of words, what I was getting at is without III you might not see the full potential.

It also depends on your chipset too I am sure, say P35 compared to the latest Haswell.
 
No, you wont see the full potential.

The best part of an SSD is latency and IOPs though, and you'll certainly see those on Sata2.
 
Sequential read/write speeds are often times useless unless you're transferring massive amounts of files across internal drives (for consumers). Unless you plan to have multiple internal SSD's transferring tens or hundreds of GB's those numbers are simple there to give you a hard on. Read speeds are more useful, but still that number has very little to do with performance gains as others have mentioned its the latency and high random read/write IOPs that really bring home the bacon.
 
The benefit will be huge. I put a Samsung 830 in a first-gen i5 laptop with a SATA2 port.

To give a few examples:
1. Boot speed went from about 3 minutes down to about 35 seconds. Power button to fully booted and usable session.
2. Opening Office or PDF documents went from noticeable wait times to damn near instantaneous.
3. Resume from hibernation became way faster than resume from sleep mode.
4. Microsoft updates take seconds now instead of minutes during shutdown/reboot.
5. Games and levels load in a fraction of the time.
6. A fresh install of Windows that used to take close to two hours is done in around 25 minutes.

Get a SATA3 SSD. It'll be worlds faster than a spindle drive, even on SATA2. Plus it'll be ready for that SATA3 port with your next system...and at that point, it'll be like a performance upgrade all over again, but free since you'll already own the SSD.
 
GotNoRice said:
Useless? I've put SSDs into computers still using first-gen SATA before and it was still a huge improvement.

Max transfer speed isn't what makes SSDs feel fast, it's being able to access lots of things simultaneously that makes them fast. If you think about a regular hard drive, the read heads can only be in one place at once... that means as you access more things simultaneously, it doesn't just get slower, it gets exponentially slower. SSDs don't have that problem and that remains true regardless of max transfer speed.
Click to expand...

pretty much this, still rocking a G5 xserve at work and replaced the boot drive with an SSD, thing flies now... amazing for a 10 year old computer...
 
I have put a Samsung 840pro on my Asus P5Q3 Deluxe motherboard and there is no going back. Faster is just an understatement and as said it is ready to be transferred to my next system.

The same for a Core 2 HP laptop that I have! With an SSD it got new life even without SATA 3.
 
Wow, glad to know I'm not the only one out there still rockin' a G5 (Power Mac DP 2.5 in my case) never even thought about putting an SSD in it... :D

When I built my gaming rig a few years ago, I did intentionally get a mobo with 6GB/s sata and a Crucial 6GB/s SSD. I did later put a SATa 6GB/s SSD in my MacBook Pro which has sata 3GB/s. It still makes a world of difference.

Most of the time, if you are waiting for the (Mass Storage) It's because you are accessing many small files that are scattered across the surface of the HDD. Not sure precisely how they measure seek time, but modern hard drives are in the 6ms or so, to locate a random sector and start moving data. Seek time is effectively zero on an SSD, because there are no moving parts.
 
ep0x73 said:
Useless might not have been the best choice of words, what I was getting at is without III you might not see the full potential.

It also depends on your chipset too I am sure, say P35 compared to the latest Haswell.
Click to expand...

FWIW, when I first bought an SSD, a SanDisk Extreme, I had it in my X58 system with SATA II. When I first converted over from a mechanical, I noticed a massive difference in performance. The SSD simply smoked the HDD in every single way.

Then I upgraded to a Z77 board with SATA III. I noticed no real difference in performance going from SATA II to SATA III. Load times in games may have improved by a second or so, but nothing aside from completely minor differences.

Going from an HDD to an SSD on any modern interface is still going to give you a dramatically noticeable improvement. The difference between those interfaces is somewhat negligible, however.
 
Least RST is better now to the point the play nice with raid. Still not keen on how reliable SSD's are but they appear to be much better.

If it needs a firmware flash does it still delete the entire OS thus forcing you to make a clone?

Besides price least to me there still can be a few hoops you might have to go through.
 
ep0x73 said:
Least RST is better now to the point the play nice with raid. Still not keen on how reliable SSD's are but they appear to be much better.

If it needs a firmware flash does it still delete the entire OS thus forcing you to make a clone?

Besides price least to me there still can be a few hoops you might have to go through.
Click to expand...

Historically, the premium brands/models of SSDs are more reliable than spindle drives.

I flashed the BIOS on my Kingston HyperX 3K 240GB post-OS install and it was fine. Not saying all will be, but I have experienced no problems for myself.

You won't have to jump through any more hoops with an SSD install as you would a spindle drive, if you even have to jump through hoops at all.
 
Heck, I threw one of my older SSDs into my PowerMac G4 using an IDE to SATA bridge and it STILL made a world of difference.
 
ep0x73 said:
300MB/host is the theoretical max and a Samsung EVO is closer to 400/500 so it would work but it would be held back.

Is this the basic consensus, you need III to get the full potential?
Click to expand...
Sure, if you are naive and fooled by synthetics.

The primary benefit of SSD's is not sequential speed. Sequential speed is the only thing HDD's are good at and you want to get away from them, right? So think about it.
 
Simply stating what Samsung says and what various reviews of EVO drives have shown, synthetic or not they have that potential.
I am sure random read/writes are in the same ballpark.
 
Sure, they have that potential. But the real value of an SSD compared to a mechanical drive is its reduction of seek time by a factor of 1000 or so.
 
Gordo74 said:
Heck, I threw one of my older SSDs into my PowerMac G4 using an IDE to SATA bridge and it STILL made a world of difference.
Click to expand...

I was actually going to try this with an old SSD and a work machine. You had fairly good results?
 
Your seek time is still significantly faster than a mechanical drive. Who the fuck cares about maximum throughput.
 
ep0x73 said:
Least RST is better now to the point the play nice with raid. Still not keen on how reliable SSD's are but they appear to be much better.

If it needs a firmware flash does it still delete the entire OS thus forcing you to make a clone?

Besides price least to me there still can be a few hoops you might have to go through.
Click to expand...

Have fun staying in the stone age.
 
I would not call a pair of V-raptors in raid1 with a 3400K burst as stone age, they are tried and true.
Websites explode onto the screen so I am more then content for now.
Eventually as SSD further matures it will be even better.
Prices have come down but you are still talking about almost $400 for the 512 pro with a 5 year warranty like WD has.

The EVO is less but still not what I would call super reasonable.

I would not say these are bad numbers.
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 x64 (C) 2007-2013 hiyohiyo

Sequential Read : 334.707 MB/s
Sequential Write : 183.085 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 458.327 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 314.705 MB/s
 
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You are measuring your user experience by how fast a website loads? Please tell me how a website 'explodes' on the screen. You are looking at rated performance the wrong way, such as worrying about sequential speeds. At first, your concern was how would using SSD's with SataII impact their perfomance, now you say you simply cant afford an SSD within your budget.

SSD's ARE mature technology now, and everything gets "better" over time.
 
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I could afford it but at this point I am satisfied with the raptors as they do what I need them to. Not to say I would not change my mind in the future.

Spinners have come quite far just as well in technology and they continue to advance as well with hybrids.

Yes, with high burst when I load a tab up in FF it snaps onto the screen and I don't have the fastest internet.
 
LOL, anyone satisfied with mechanical drivers over SSD is simply being ignorant or just fooling themselves.

I've run RAPTORS since they came out... and SSD since 2010... yeah, they are THAT MUCH more noticeable, and in 2010 vs now it's even more of a "wow" factor.


If you think raptors "SNAP" wait until you go SSD. My parents on 30mbit noticed 'faster' internet page load "snappyness" (and they're not young and tech savvy) and me on 3G/4G at the time it was a HUGE difference too how fast that cache hit would load, or even normal resources still loaded instantly with the SSD.

SSD is def. not useless on old systems if you must use the old system:D
 
Power aside, noise and heat you could take 4 new raptors in raid 10 and hit SSD speeds for about the same price of just one 512GB 840 pro.

That single 840 pro shits the bed you just toasted your OS so buy another for raid1, now you are looking at $800.

There is no doubt they are fast, that was never in question but price/performance is still not there just yet.

I bought two new 500GB raptors for $80 each, that was a steal.

You can score one EVO 250 for that price right now.
 
No matter how many raptors you put in a RAID, their access times are still several thousand times slower than a single SSD.
 
It seems we will never reach a state where people understand that SSDs are not primarily about sequential transfer rates.
 
True, it was just a reference. The question is how fast is fast enough for you? If the machine becomes faster then you react is that speed being wasted?

I suppose I got used to waiting since back in the day when drives were damn slow, everything was slow.

When I want to feel the pain I fire up my P4 with old barracuda pata drives.
 
If a drive can find the files it needs faster, it loads everything faster regardless of random reads and writes.

I don't usually like to use Tom's Hardware, but they're the only ones with the data I'm looking for on a quick search (I know there's others). There's a reason why RAID 0 for SSDs in desktop usage is essentially usage.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485-4.html

At low queue depths (general desktop usage), RAID 0 has absolutely no benefit over single SSDs.
 
Like I said, have fun playing with hardware from the stone age. Just because you don't mind slower storage performance doesn't mean that SSD's "don't make sense" at this time. The only reason why you're saying all of this is because you're too cheap to buy one and that you can't understand SSD performance benchmarks. Nobody in this world makes an SSD review comparing one from today versus your old shity PATA setup from 15 years ago.

I can't believe people in this day still have this type of "anti-SSD" mentality/anxiety/fear/retardation.
 
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Funny how I started the post by simply asking if a new SSD would work on older hardware and chipsets and then it turns all personal, that I am anti-SSD.

Some people are slower to adopt and satisfied with what they have, some are not.

Maybe I don't understand SSD benchmarks because I do not own one and simply go by what professional reviewers say just as most people do.

You must have totally missed the point about the "old shitty pata setup" I was referring to.

The point being made that went over your head was back in the day that was considered fast but if you are on a modern build and then go back you can see just how slow it really was.
 
You asked a question and people answered it, it's when you tried to argue with the unanimous response that people started to argue back(as opposed to debate).

Sata II is only going to hold an SSD back in a few rare situations, about the only situation I can think of that you might want to consider fast spinners in a raid array is if you're working with uncompressed video since space matters as much as speed in that situation. Even then many video professionals are moving to raid arrays using larger slightly slower SSDs.

You keep mentioning on the PATA comparison as if it demonstrates your point, my old ATA 100 drive boots much slower than my WD Black but both are in the same ballpark in comparison to my SSD(Crucial M4 on SATA II). As other have said it's the advantage that SSDs have in faster seek times and faster small reads and writes that make a difference in how "snappy" a computer feels with an SSD in it.

I don't think reliability is questionable these days unless you're comparing it to enterprise drives in a redundancy RAID setup, if you're worried about it get a slightly older model with a proven track record and mature firmware.
 
I appreciate the answers and those who noted that even with older chipsets or even going back as far as sata I it still made a difference.

I only brought up pata for nostalgic purposes and how painfully slow it is compared to today but at the time it was cutting edge, that is all.

If I were to jump on the SSD bandwagon the smart choice would be Samsung which has a proven record and makes their drives in house with their own components, no 3rd party like marvell to screw things up.
I am actually a Micron share holder but their product is not quite as good as what Samsung brings to the table.

One of the few negatives I've read is the sata connector is fairly fragile and can break, not sure if that is true or the poster simply was too aggressive or had bad cabling.
 
One of the few negatives I've read is the sata connector is fairly fragile and can break
Click to expand...

Its not that fragile but I have seen 1 sata connector break at work (out of several 100) in the 10 years that we have used SATA drives.
 
ep0x73 said:
I appreciate the answers and those who noted that even with older chipsets or even going back as far as sata I it still made a difference.

I only brought up pata for nostalgic purposes and how painfully slow it is compared to today but at the time it was cutting edge, that is all.

If I were to jump on the SSD bandwagon the smart choice would be Samsung which has a proven record and makes their drives in house with their own components, no 3rd party like marvell to screw things up.
I am actually a Micron share holder but their product is not quite as good as what Samsung brings to the table.

One of the few negatives I've read is the sata connector is fairly fragile and can break, not sure if that is true or the poster simply was too aggressive or had bad cabling.
Click to expand...

I'd go with a Crucial M500/M550 over a Samsung Evo any day. I'm still not sold on TLC SSDs, especially after seeing the Tech Reports SSD Endurance testing. I understand that I'll likely never have that many writes, but in my head it bothers me. The price of the M500 is also quite good for the features you get.
 
Check out the Seagate 600 and 600 Pro. Built with quality components and they perform damn good. When they go on sale, it's hard to find a better SSD at a cheaper price.
 
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