SATA III SSD But SATA II motherboard?

[gregy]

I've got the SSD installed and ready now. I know it's backwards compatible with SATA II. But Is there any way I can get a SATA III Port without sacrificing the only PCIe port I have? (Which is reserved for my GTX 760) Or getting a new motherboard?

[dadasmithywinkle]

It won't make too much of a difference. Given, there will be a tid bit of preformance loss, but it won't matter. And no - there won't be a way to do it if you dont have another PCIE/PCI port.

[MrKickkiller]

Nope. What motherboard do you have?

[gregy]

GA-78-LMT-S2P.

Gigabyte.

 

And also, It will halve the performance. Or at least near to it. I got 260 read and 260 write.

 

Is it worth spending the £55 to upgrade my motherboard? What else will I gain from it?

[TheGeekster]

Depends on the rest of your system, with a slightly more expensive larger ATX motherboard, you could fit more ram, SATA3, USB3.0, mild future upgradability with the newer AM3+ processors

 

Otherwise yep, you're stuck at that still pretty damn good read & write speed

[FSBAlston]

I've got the SSD installed and ready now. I know it's backwards compatible with SATA II. But Is there any way I can get a SATA III Port without sacrificing the only PCIe port I have? (Which is reserved for my GTX 760) Or getting a new motherboard?

I would say no, but you're not going to be hurting on sata ii. I threw in an 840 evo as a replacement boot drive on my p55. Damn thing was like night and day (actually made me permanently consider ssds for boot drives). You'll be satisfied with the speeds on sata2.

[wpirobotbuilder]

Just use the older motherboard. You'll still see all the performance benefits except when doing sequential file transfers.

[Captain_WD]

I've got the SSD installed and ready now. I know it's backwards compatible with SATA II. But Is there any way I can get a SATA III Port without sacrificing the only PCIe port I have? (Which is reserved for my GTX 760) Or getting a new motherboard?

 

 

Hey gregy,

 

As @wpirobotbuilder suggested, you will still have great speeds and still get to keep your PCIe port and won't have to get a new mobo. Unless you are aiming for great speeds and use that SSD for a workstation computer, you should be just fine even with SATA2 speeds (limited to 375MB/s).

 

Captain_WD.

[adhisakti]

 

Hey gregy,

 

As @wpirobotbuilder suggested, you will still have great speeds and still get to keep your PCIe port and won't have to get a new mobo. Unless you are aiming for great speeds and use that SSD for a workstation computer, you should be just fine even with SATA2 speeds (limited to 375MB/s).

 

Captain_WD.

 

 

Agreed, it's still so much faster than using harddrives. I use SSD on my old Core2 Duo laptop with SATA2 and it performs great.

[Zolon]

It is worth it. It all depends on the SATA controller. My Laptop with SATA 2 is faster than my old desktop, depite it having SATA 3. The first gen AMD SATA 3 Controller was just garbage.

[DerBernd]

You do not need to upgrade your mainboard. How large is your SSD anyway? The difference in speed is so small that you would need to transfer massive amounts of data to get a significant time saving. The random access of the SSD is very close on SATAII and SATAIII. That is what makes the operating system load so fast, you do not need to have massive bandwith rather than low latency.

I'm running a SSD from SATA2 and it runs just fine, as fast as I need.

 

For your viewing pleasure some graphs:

 

4 Gb sequential read/write.

 

4K sectors read and write, Q stands for how many actions are queued. Unqueued the SATA2 does hold up very well.

 

 

 

Since you do not have a path into your computer that can carry more data than SATA2 can handle (consumer hard disks do not saturate SATA2) you will not miss the speed advantage. Gigabit Ethernet is slower and USB 3.0 is about the same.

 

Comparison of boot times:

 

Boot & Load times are the same, so upgrading only for that reason would constitute wasteful spending.

 

The Link to the article. It is in German though so you might not understand it, the Graphs are in English though

[Dabombinable]

Sata 3 SSDs are fine on Sata 2 motherboards, I know that because I have a 11-12 second post-logon time on my P5K