ssd on sata 2 board

[johnwa]

I have a 5/6 year old Asrock conroexfire board, its working very well so don't feel inclined to buy a new PC, but i would like to improve if possible. I was thinking about buying a samsung SSD to act as the boot disk, but will it work properly on the sata 2 board ?

Is there anything i need to do or can i just load W7 onto the ssd ?
Can i convert the sata 2 ports to sata 3 ?

thanks for any help
John

[- wardog -]

1. In theory you should be fine installing Windows to your SSD. You'll obviously be limited to SATA-II speeds. Albeit higher throughput than mechanical HDDs.

2. Nope. You can't "convert' one to the other.

[parsec]

All SATA III SSDs will work fine on a SATA II interface, although they won't be able to reach their highest performance level, particularly in benchmarks.

A SATA III SSD on a SATA II board will still perform far better than a HDD. I've used SSDs on both SATA II and SATA III boards, and I'd say you will get ~70% of the potential performance of the SSD on a SATA II board, so it is well worth doing.

In your case there are two main potential issues you must check, one of those seems to be already solved. That is, you said you'll be using Windows 7. Only Windows 7 and newer MS OSs support the TRIM command, which is a big help in maintaining SSD performance. Related to this is you seem to use XP now. XP does not align the starting offset of the OS installation on SSDs, which reduces write performance. But as long as you are using Windows 7, you won't have this problem.

The other somewhat lesser possible issue is if you can set the SATA mode to AHCI. AHCI mode and the driver that will be loaded when that is set, provides a feature called NCQ, which allows a SSD to reach its full potential performance (besides the SATA II or SATA III interface). NCQ is not available in IDE mode, or Legacy, etc. An alternative to AHCI is RAID mode, which provides NCQ too. You can use RAID mode and never create a RAID array, or need to deal with anything related to RAID.

You should set the SATA mode to AHCI or RAID before you install Windows, since you cannot simply change from IDE mode to either of them without a registry modification.

A SATA II board cannot be changed to SATA III. Add on, so called SATA III PCIe boards exist, but really barely exceed the performance of the the SATA II interface on the board. The only add on cards that can provide performance close to a true SATA III mother board, cost more than a high end mother board, or board and CPU. Then the mother board must allow booting from an add on card, which is not common.

[- wardog -]

M u s t t y p e f a s t e r

[parsec]

M u s t t y p e f a s t e r

Or limit myself to 1000 words or less... That'll be the day...

[- wardog -]

Or limit myself to 1000 words or less...

Don't do that. Your explanations and help here truly are a Tour de Force. Heaven forbid I discourage that.

Anyways, I read every word.

[parsec]

A Tour de France, how did you know I'm wearing spandex?!?!?!

As my one professor used to tell me, "... you have diarrhea of the mouth, and constipation of the mind...".

[johnwa]

Thanks for all your help, it sounds like its a worthwhile upgrade so i will order the Samsung SSD.

John

[profJim]

I upgraded my P35 system to win7 and a 60GB ssd a little over 2 years ago. It was a huge performance upgrade!!
My system started to lag a bit when the ssd only had 10GB of free space remaining, so I bought a Samsung 830 128GB ssd to replace the nearly full 60GB SSD 5 months ago. Performance with the Samsung ssd is at the high end of the sata2 limits.

Take a look at new SSD: OCZ Agility2 60GB (Extended Capacity) to see the steps that I performed for installing win7 on my ssd. My motherboard doesn't support raid so I set AHCI mode in my bios before I installed win7 on my ssd.

Make sure that your ssd is the only drive (other than optical) in your system during the win7 install.

Be sure to check out the ~20% improvement I got in post #44 with my WD Caviar Black hard drives when I performed a 4K partition alignment on all partitions on my existing hard drive. You might find that Macrium Reflect or EaseUS partition software now includes 4K partition alignment. I realigned each partition one at a time starting with the first partition on my hard drive. Just to be safe, I backed up all the data on each partition, one at a time just to be safe. Under win7's Disk Management, when you create a new partition, it will automatically be 4K aligned.

[- wardog -]

Not to step on your two's posts, but

It looks like my post is 12 lines long and parsec's is 13 lines long.

That is wrong! Just wrong. In too many ways wrong.