What does SATA III compatible mean?

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jms209

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Oct 1, 2012
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I have a Lenovo P585 laptop.

Here are the specs:
http://www.lenovo.com/images/products/laptops/ideapad/P&N-Series/PDF/P585-Datasheet.pdf

One thing that has me confused is that the page says that my laptop is SATA II,but SATA III compatible. Does that mean that it's just compatible/just works or that I will get SATA III speeds if a SATA III device is used?

Can someone look the page over and tell me what they think?
I was thinking that it meant that it will work,but not at the intended speed of SATA III.
 
Solution
M
I'm not sure what situation with your laptop's SATA controller is. Since you're getting mixed results with the analysis software, I would tend to trust Lenovo's web page, which lists your laptop as SATA II and only "SATA III compatible".

If you are only SATA II you will not notice very much difference, maybe half the boot time and faster program load times, not much if any difference in games. Probably not enough to justify the expense. However, if it IS SATA III, then your boot times would be about one fourth the times and program load times much faster, but only justified if you have the money to spend and don't mind the smaller disk size.

Personally, having experienced SSDs, I would not go back, but then I can afford to buy them...
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mbreslin1954

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It runs at SATA II (3 Gbps) speeds, but of course will work with SATA III (6 Gbps). SATA III is backward compatible with SATA II. For magnetic, spinning hard drives, it doesn't make a difference, but for solid state drives (SSDs) it will. I put an SSD in one of these laptops with SATA 2 and only get about 210 MB/s read speeds. However, I have a couple of laptops with native SATA 3 controllers and in these my SSDs get almost 400 MB/s read speeds.

They seem to make most budget laptops with SATA II controllers. You only seem to get SATA III controllers in the more expensive laptops. Too bad.
 
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jms209

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So will it really effect performance?
Considering I will replace my HDD with a SSD.

These are the speeds I get with my HDD right now.


Also ran PC wizard(don't know how good it is)


It says I have 6GBS,so does that mean I have SATA III?
Still thinking it's SATA II,since I ran HWINFO64 and that said it was 3GBS.
 
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mbreslin1954

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I'm not sure what situation with your laptop's SATA controller is. Since you're getting mixed results with the analysis software, I would tend to trust Lenovo's web page, which lists your laptop as SATA II and only "SATA III compatible".

If you are only SATA II you will not notice very much difference, maybe half the boot time and faster program load times, not much if any difference in games. Probably not enough to justify the expense. However, if it IS SATA III, then your boot times would be about one fourth the times and program load times much faster, but only justified if you have the money to spend and don't mind the smaller disk size.

Personally, having experienced SSDs, I would not go back, but then I can afford to buy them and don't mind paying the price.
 
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jms209

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Oct 1, 2012
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I bought a 120gb kingston ssd for $70,which seems like a great deal.
I'm going to replace my DVD Drive/optical and put in the SSD.

So I will have a 750gb HDD for storage and games.
Then the 120gb SSD for the OS and all software.
 
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