SSD with sataII is basically useless?

[fantabulous]

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.

PeterNorth.com would explode on screen, so to speak.

 

[wonderfield]

Your seek time is still significantly faster than a mechanical drive. Who the fuck cares about maximum throughput.

Bingo. People like to look at sequential read speeds as the de facto measure of performance, but what you really want to look at are random reads on relatively small blocks of data. Even on SATA II, SSDs are an order of magnitude faster than mechanical disks where it really counts.

 

[ep0x73]

You could RAID those, too.

You could have back in the day. My board had a built in highpoint 4 channel raid but it never worked right, bad drivers, just buggy.

 

[FiveFig]

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.

I wanted to add something, but you took the words right out of my mouth.
Putting an 840 Pro in my desktop (look at my sig for full specs) running a Q6600 with SATAII, was one of the most noticeable upgrades I'd seen for a while.

With the latest samsung magician software update (a couple weeks ago) I am hitting 630MB/s sequential read and 510MB/s sequential write speeds along with 95k-100K IOPS

This is putting my SATAII connection into the SATAIII realm, which absolutely rocked my socks off! (If anyone want's a screenshot with my validated test, just send me a PM to remind me and I will post it.)

Only things I can think of as a perk you might have missed are: Power Consumption & Shock Resistance!~
On average, a SSD will draw 10% the power of a HD (for equal storage ie 500GB vs 500GB)
Dropping a laptop (oh noes!) A SSD can withstand up to 1,500G during operation, while your average HD can only withstand ~50-100G

 

[spankit]

Theoretical maximum throughput of SATAII is about 375MB/s so either the software you're using is full of beans or you have that thing connected to a SATAIII port. Seeing as that motherboard doesn't have a SATAIII port I would assume that the software is the culprit for the odd results.

 

[drescherjm]

Theoretical maximum throughput of SATAII is about 375MB/s so either the software you're using is full of beans or you have that thing connected to a SATAIII port. Seeing as that motherboard doesn't have a SATAIII port I would assume that the software is the culprit for the odd results.

I assume they finally enabled the RAPID software cache for the 840 Pro.

 

[dandragonrage]

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?

In most cases, a single SSD on a SATA 150 link (though it has to be a decent SSD, not some old JMicron one) would trounce a RAID-0 array of SATA III HDDs.