Buying Considerations for Running a SATA III SSD on a SATA II PC

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fn9

Weaksauce
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I'm considering an SSD for my netbook which is SATA II. I'm wondering what specs will make the biggest difference in performance considering I only have SATA II. Is there a point of diminishing returns on such a setup? If so, where might it be?

Netbook is a couple years old ASUS 1001PX running XP 32 bit w/ upgraded RAM (2gb)
 
SATAII saturates at 300 MB/s including overhead while recent SSDs can achieve 550 MB/ sequential speed. An Atom netbook cannot make any use of such a high transfer speed anyway except a sequential copy operation, but then there normally is no other storage attached that can achieve equal speed. So no, there will not be any real-world difference. The main advantage of SSDs is their access time and that is not dependent on SATAII/SATAIII.
 
Well it seems most drives on the market are SATA III, so what I'm really wondering is if someone with a SATA II PC experiences any performance gains at all by going with a nicer SATA III drive over a budget SATA III.
 
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This is where you'll have to compare random read / writes and the like, as not all SATA II drives saturate the link for all workloads. So check the SATA III benchmarks for non-sequential I/O. Some SATA III drives do use async NAND so they might not necessarily be better.

Or make your life easy: Just get a Samsung 830 when they go on sale next.
 
Honestly, real world difference between a good SATA II drive and a SATA III drive even on SATA II? You probably won't notice it, but that's just my speculation and observation from what others around say about upgrading from previous gen SSDs to current gen SSDs. Just get whatever is a good bargain at the moment, those Crucial M4s, Samsung's 830/840 drives, etc, when they're on sale.
 
Considering current prices, buy a good SSD no matter the usage, you won't regret it.
 
The primary benefit of SSD's is not the sequential throughput, contrary to what most people want you to believe, so in a normal workload you wouldn't notice a difference between II and III. If you were reading/writing large files to the drive as a primary workload, then you would want a fully Sata III compatible system, whether HDD or SSD.
 
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I went from a mechanical drive to a 256GB Intel 330 in my desktop that only has SATA 3gb (SATA II) ports and the difference was very noticable.
 
And even then having an SSD that can sustain 500MB/s does not translate well to real world, because something else will bottleneck you. Gigabit Ethernet tops out at about 85-90MB/s. Big platter drives top out at about 150MB/s, and external drives aren't much better. So the only time you can really use such bandwidth is transferring from one SSD to another or transferring from SSD to big RAID of platters. But again you need to consider your usage. Personally I would rather have a (theoretical) SSD that does 200MB/s no matter what kind of file then a drive that has 550 seq and like 60 4k.

But either way they are a wonderfull thing. I put an SSD in an old Core Solo laptop and it made a huge difference in the feel of the laptop.
 
nevermind, it got cancelled.

so comparing a Crucial V4 to a Crucial M4 on a SATA II system, does the M4 have any advantage at all?
 
m4 is so cheap already I wouldn't bother with a v4. Just a guess, but I'm betting a m4 would still outperform at v4 on a sata2 system in a somewhat noticeable way.
 
There's a good deal on V4s right now, so I'd like to know what the difference would be (if any). Does anyone know for sure? Thank you

edit: Crucial tech chat states "You would actually want the V4, you can't use the M4 6GB/s." what a friggin joke.
 
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Like I already said, at current prices, you want the best drive. It's like if a BMW was 10% more than a Hyundai. We would all be driving German.

edit : resale value will also be very different.
 
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My wife has an Atom netbook that I put a 64GB Crucial M4 into. It definitely helps, but the machine is still slow. Obviously the M4 works, but yeah only at SATA2. I put that drive in her netbook WAY before the V4's even came out.
 
I've used a Crucial M4 64gb on an Acer netbook with Atom N570 (dual core 1.66Ghz). The difference was noticeable over the stock Hitachi 250gb 5400rpm drive.

Am now running a Samsung 830 128gb. No difference in day to day tasks over the M4 64gb.

You might want to note whether your netbook accepts drives taller than 7mm. My Acer will only take 7mm without modifications.
 
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