SSD SATA 3 ON SATA 2 Motherboard

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Pilk

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Hey guys, im pretty sure this has been asked before but need some assistance with this.

I am in the market for a Corsair SSD i have been looking at the 120 GB Force which is a sata 3 drive.

My questions is as follows, u have a sata 2 motherboard and would like to get this drive, i know it is compatible, my main concern is i do not want to get an add on card and will not be upgrading my board i simply like to know what difference in read and write speeds will i suffer from if i use the existing sata 2 ports. To my own knowledge i will not suffer much at all, except for the fact that some people say that the controllers mite not support trim? what is trim and how does it work?

Thank you for your time guys.
 
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The only issue is that the transfer rate will suffer an absolute cap at a little below 300 MByte/sec. TRIM will still be passed. Be sure to do your new install with the BIOS set to AHCI mode and the SSD as the only drive that is attached.

TRIM is a command sent by the OS when a file is deleted or blocks are otherwise freed up. It tells the SSD that this space is no longer in use and may be added to the list of available pages. There has been a great deal of discussion, bordering on religious debate, about the need for TRIM when Garbage Collection is implemented.
The only issue is that the transfer rate will suffer an absolute cap at a little below 300 MByte/sec. TRIM will still be passed. Be sure to do your new install with the BIOS set to AHCI mode and the SSD as the only drive that is attached.

TRIM is a command sent by the OS when a file is deleted or blocks are otherwise freed up. It tells the SSD that this space is no longer in use and may be added to the list of available pages. There has been a great deal of discussion, bordering on religious debate, about the need for TRIM when Garbage Collection is implemented.
 
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groberts101

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That Sandforce drive will post ATTO speeds of around 280/270 on a capable sata2 chipset(X58 being the best).

and WyomingKnott is right.. but it should be noted that just because the TRIM command is passed and the blocks are marked has nothing to do with WHEN the controller actually decides to clean and return them back to the fresh block pool.

Sandforce has long proven to utilize lazy-TRIM recovery and most is done during GC idle time. About the only time a Sandforce controller will make immediate use of TRIM commands is when the drive is full dirty and must do it on-the-fly to avoid read-write-modify slowdowns.
 

Pilk

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OK Awesome Trim now i know. Thats cool that corsair drive has garbage collection as well, what is that about and why would it sit in place to trim? So i would suffer a whole 300MB/S for a sata 2 port? Are you sure thats correct that sounds rather hectic =), thank you guys this is turning out to be a very interesting question am learning a thing or two =). I am using an H55 chipset board not sure if that changes anything.
 

tecmo34

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1) Do you plan on updating to a SATA III capable motherboard any time soon?
■ Answer - Yes: I would stick with Corsair but would lean more towards Crucial m4 at this time (Sandforce hasn't totally fixed the random BSOD with the Sandforce 2200 controllers)
■ Answer = No: I would just pick up a OCZ Vertex 2 and roll with it. They are very capable drives and will have similar (if not really the same) speeds as the Corsair Force SSD.

2) You would suffer roughly a 200 MB/s loss on a SATA II board, as it caps out at 300 MB/s. You will more than likely run at the 270 MB/s range versus the 550 MB/s range on an Intel SATA III capable motherboard.
 

Pilk

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Awesome. I will not be going for OCZ as i have heard a lot about DOA'S on these drives, when i was retailing OCZ products i had huge manufacturing issues, i"ll stick to Corsair. Now the Crucial everyone seems to be talking about them what makes them better here in SA the brand is extremely hard to find, so not sure if i will be able to get my hands on one unless i import which im not keen for. I will be upgrading to Sata 3 probably in the next year or so after i get the SSD drive. Im running 4 X 250GB Seagate 7200RPM drives in a striped array and am averaging 180 MB/S on larger files, should i rather wait and get the sata 3 controller and the drive together, is it will not make that much of an impact on my current systems read and write.
 

Pilk

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Oh sorry one other thing so the Cosair drive im talking about uses the sandforce controller is that correct? I will never understand this data transfer rate over exaggeration sata 2 is supposed to be a maximum transfer rate of about 3GBPS but cant handle read and writes of up to 300MBPS, that is so ridiculous! =)
 

jendzora

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Hi there, this is my first post here, so just let me say hello to everyone!

The key is in the details (as often) as 3GBPS is not equal to 3Gb/s. We can round things for a moment, but 3Gb equals approx 375MB so whether per second or not - the same proportion remains ^^

So - there is almost no exaggeration about SATA2...

^^
 

jendzora

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Wyoming knot

You're absolutely right about the bits-per-second estimation being raw. But please kindly note that if 8/10 coding is used, then we have to account for 10 bits per byte as opposed to usual 8. This allows for the balancing you mentioned.

What I meant in my response though was the usual misinterpretation of GBPS vs Gb/s rather than quoting the exact value.
 

Pilk

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LOL thank you Wyom i have to go through that wiki link and understand a few things its a little hardcore for my knowledge, Thanks for the help guys i understand alot more then i used to about SSD and data transfers.
 

jcrawfor74

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Pilk, I had the same question.

So I bought a Corsair Force GT 120GB and attached it via SATA II to my old PC.
I have benchmarked it and blogged about the results here..

http://ntsblog.homedev.com.au/index.php/2012/01/11/sata-3-ssd-running-on-sata-ii-benchmark/

The short of it is sequential read maxed out @ 264mb/s but my windows start times dropped from 1min 20 sec's to 24 seconds and application load times are much reduced.

I'm going to try to get my hands on a SATA 3 add-on card and see what benefit that has, over running on SATA 2
 

Pilk

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Ah awesome man am busy on the same thing will be buying an add on card next month so will bench my results to. And by the way this is an AWESOME SSD for anyone who wants to purchase one very affordable and performs very well!

 
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