Sata II to Sata III, Any difference?

[riCtus]

So i got my SSD that i ordered and it supports sata III 6Gb/s but my motherboard doesn't. Now i was thinking to get a pci ssd adapter that supports sata III 6Gb/s(as shown on the picture below) and put it on my pci-e x1 slot on my motherboard. But would it make any differences? I'll also upload a pic of my ssd speed(CrystalDiskMark benchmark)

My motherboard: Asus h61m-k

Thanks

[Mira Yurizaki]

It may not matter since a lot of applications don't saturate the bandwidth of SATA I when loading.

 

It was a long time ago (I mean, now it's a long time ago), but I recall having an SSD in my laptop with SATA II and it was just as fast (if not faster) than my desktop with an SSD on SATA III.

[riCtus]

Just now, M.Yurizaki said:

It may not matter since a lot of applications don't saturate the bandwidth of SATA I when loading.

 

It was a long time ago (I mean, now it's a long time ago), but I recall having an SSD in my laptop with SATA II and it was just as fast (if not faster) than my desktop with an SSD on SATA III.

Alright, i guess i'm gonna put my ssd on my sata connector. Thank you so much for your reply

[Electronics Wizardy]

I did some testing on this a bit ago. 

 

For most desktop uses, it makes almost no difference. You limited by the random performance, not the sequential speeds. and sata ii doesn't limit random speeds much.

[WereCatf]

4 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

It may not matter since a lot of applications don't saturate the bandwidth of SATA I when loading.

 

It was a long time ago (I mean, now it's a long time ago), but I recall having an SSD in my laptop with SATA II and it was just as fast (if not faster) than my desktop with an SSD on SATA III.

I have the complete opposite experience. Loading-times in games, like e.g Battlefield, improved dramatically, when the SSD was connected to SATA3 vs when it was connected to SATA2. Sure, if you only install desktop-apps on it, then it might not matter much, but big apps/games will still see a benefit as long as the SSD itself can handle the speeds.

[Mira Yurizaki]

3 minutes ago, WereCatf said:

I have the complete opposite experience. Loading-times in games, like e.g Battlefield, improved dramatically, when the SSD was connected to SATA3 vs when it was connected to SATA2. Sure, if you only install desktop-apps on it, then it might not matter much, but big apps/games will still see a benefit as long as the SSD itself can handle the speeds.

I've characterized the readband width a few games every second from start to finish loading. Only a few exceeded 150MB/s and it was brief. And this was on SATA and NVMe.

 

So I'm not entirely convinced it really plays a huge difference.

[WereCatf]

1 minute ago, M.Yurizaki said:

I've characterized the readband width a few games every second from start to finish loading. Only a few exceeded 150MB/s and it was brief. And this was on SATA and NVMe.

 

So I'm not entirely convinced it really plays a huge difference.

I can only speak from personal experience, but it definitely did make a major difference. On SATA3, e.g. Battlefield 1 did read the SSD at around 450MB/s almost the entire time it was loading the game/map.

[wONKEyeYEs]

2 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

So I'm not entirely convinced it really plays a huge difference.

I would tend to agree if you were not a robot of no importance.

[mariushm]

sata 2 is still 300 MB/s ... you're not going to constantly copy files to and from ssd at more than 300 MB/s and the average files you're gonna read from SSD are small enough (tens of MB) that whatever file you copy it's going to load in milliseconds ... you're not going to notice a difference between 1 and 3 ms for example.

 

Quote

Battlefield 1 did read the SSD at around 450MB/s almost the entire time it was loading the game/map.

copying from flat file to memory directly, big blocks of continuous data like a level, or high res textures, or music files will be fast... but is it worth the hassle for a few seconds saved when loading a game?

[WereCatf]

4 minutes ago, mariushm said:

copying from flat file to memory directly, big blocks of continuous data like a level, or high res textures, or music files will be fast... but is it worth the hassle for a few seconds saved when loading a game?

What hassle do you mean, exactly? How can there be any "hassle" when using SATA3 instead of SATA2? I mean, you only set it up once. Besides, like I have now said multiple times, it did make a major difference.

[mariushm]

The question was about using that adapter thing to get sata 3 speeds.

 

pci-e x1 is either 500 MB/s (pci-e v2.0) or ~970 MB/s if it's pci-e v3.0 - that's maximum theoretical speeds, in real world you don't get that much.

Then you're also dealing with pci-e and interrupt overhead  and moving packets through another bus instead of having the data connected directly to the chipset.

 

AMD systems have pci-e v2.0 slots , except on the latest chipsets (b450 and the other i think) , b350 and x370 and the older chipsets have pci-e v2.0 slots.

 

That particular motherboard asus h61m-k has pci-e x1 v2.0 slots so like i said, at best you're gonna have a maximum theoretical 500 MB/s speed, not 600 MB/s as sata 3 can do. Then overhead and other things will get the max speed lower, maybe to around 450 MB/s at best.

 

So you can wire the drive directly to sata2 and have 300 MB/s or you can buy some adapter to gain maybe 150 MB/s extra but also lose some cpu performance (there would be more cpu usage when transferring data for long periods of time)

 

imho not worth it.