Sata II ssd?

By the time that solid state drives were mainstream, no-one bothered to make drives with SATA II interfaces. Even HDDs these days are made with SATA III interfaces to avoid the expense of making and stocking two different types of drive interface chips.

I have a solid-state drive attached to an SATA II port on my mobo (mobo has no SATA III ports) and I'm thrilled with the performance, though.

Don't know where you get that from, there were loads of them. Vertex, Vertex2, Vertex2E, Agility 2, etc.
and a whole plethora of equivalent models from Corsair, Samsung, Kingston, etc. Quite a few of the OEM
Samsung SATA2 SSDs end up on eBay, need to be careful one doesn't mistake them for a later model.

eg. see:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3681/oczs-vertex-2-special-sauce-sf1200-reviewed/5

Ian.

AS-SSD, Crystal Disk Mark, HDTach and ATTO are typical free utilities.

Note that I cited that article because by definition SATA2 SSDs are indeed old now. Nobody makes
them anymore. All modern SSDs are SATA3 by default.

Also as I tried to explain before, by definition, a SATA3 is the same thing as 6Gbps. Likewise, SATA2 = 300Gbps
(or 300MB/sec approx.), so it's impossible for a SATA2 to be any faster than that. The two terms you've
mentioned basically refer to the same thing, just different marketing ways in which companies & users refer
to the max speeds and connection speeds.

Let me put it this way, if I told you how fast you were going in your car in mph and also in feet-per-year,
they'd be two very different numbers, but both define exactly the same velocity.

Btw, using RAID0 is a bad idea for anything that needs long term reliability. Lose one device and the
whole array is lost. Fine for scratch drives & suchlike, but use RAID10 for anything which needs reliability
and long term use. I was able to get 700MB/sec with 4 ports RAID10 on a SATA2 board.

If you want reliability, then use the Samsung 840, 840 EVO, 840 Pro, 850 Pro, Sandisk X210, Vector,
or various other top-tier models. For the work you're doing, definitely avoid the budget models like
the M500, MX100, etc.

I hope you're using a Quadro card for 4K. You won't get accurate colour grading with a gamer card.

Also, for the best possible consistence performance, you ought to use a decent RAID card like an Areca,
or just use a mbd like the Asrock X99 Extreme11 which has built-in SAS and lots of ports, or of course
if you can afford it, a dual-socket XEON board.

Btw, you do realise that film data is all sequential I/O? Using SSDs doesn't really gain you that much.
For film I/O, SAS drives would give the same performance levels in a RAID setup, since the I/O is almost
always large request sizes (30 to 60MB per frame, perhaps more, depending on depth, Alpha, res, etc.)

Ian.

PS. Other prosumer alternative, the one I'd use if I couldn't afford XEONs: ASUS X99-E WS, fitted with
a RAID card. Naturally, use a RAID card which has some cache RAM and battery backup. I bagged an
old HP P410 with 1GB RAM that easily manages 2GB/sec, includes battery backup. Lots of newer options
now though.

PS. Update! The SanDisk X300 is quite a good model atm, well priced, I bought a 256GB for my HTPC, 128GB for
general testing, they were 71 and 41 UKP respectively (new from Scan). People are paying more than this for
used older SanDisk models on eBay. There's a 512GB X300 aswell, but few places sell it.

Don't know how you thought SATA2 was faster than SATA3. ;D The numbering alone should be
enough for correct inference. Afterall, who thinks Terminator 3 came out before Terminator 2?

Anyhoo, doesn't matter, just Google, have a read of the SATA wiki page, plenty of info there.

Nice warranty on the Pro, though really it's just marketing fluff, as all vendors know most desktop
users will, a) never use their SSDs enough to exhaust the warranted daily full device writes, b)
very likely replace their SSD with something better (more space) long before the warranty period
is up. It'd be like giving a 10 year warranty on a smart phone - who keeps one that long.

However, good to know they have the confidence it'll survive for those who do keep their
tech for a long time.

Strange, some seller sites here show the warranty as 3 years, but maybe that's just with
the seller, rather than the after-sale registration with SanDisk (yeah, most likely; which
reminds me, I need to register my 850 Pros and X300s...)

I'd still buy an X300 instead of the Extreme Pro though, the latter costs about 40% more
but one would never notice the difference. Likewise, the X300 is almost half the cost of
an 850 Pro.

Ian.

PS. Did a check yesterday, I have about 50+ SSDs total atm.

No prob.

Not too much coffee mind!! You don't want to end up like Beavis (or is it Butthead? Can't remember,
the one who od's and goes whacko)

Ian.

Yup! And good choice for the general storage, the Black is one of the few I'd bother with (that or any of the Seagates
which end in NS). I avoid the lesser end of consumer rust spinners, not reliable enough. Actually I got lucky last year,
managed to bag a whole bunch of new Seagate Enterprise 2TB SATA for the equivalent of $120 each (normally a lot
more expensive) plus some equivalent Hitachi drives.

Re SSDs (remember the 'D'! Pretty sure no solid state drive has fascist leanings, hehe) I'm hoping this year will be
when we get a price collapse on 512GB models.

Ian.