New ssd - wnich model and capacity ?

[Safat]

good morning, I hope that I came across a good forum biggrin.gif

My Intel SSD is broken and I need buy new. I looked at the new disks, but they are on SATA III. I have a MOBO with SATA II. Is it compatible?

Reading the forum I saw that most people recommend these two drives - Crucial m4, Samsung 830 and Plextor M3 (in my country isn't it available). I have for you a few questions. How much I lose in performance SATA III on the SATA II ? Due to the SATA II which SSD and capacity I choose ? Use only the basic software with two games (~50 GB). Take the 64GB version with poor performance or 128GB with a better perfomance ?

I care about boot time, instalations games and programs, loading levels in games and the support from the producer. I need performance in everyday use, I use rarely very large files.


Can I install Intel Rapid Storage Technology in Windows 7 ? This is required ?

 

[WyomingKnott]

An SSD with SATA III interface will run perfectly well on an SATA II motherboard. You will lose some of the potential bandwidth, but it will be head and shoulders above an HDD. I know; I am running such a rig.

My answer to which drive is "The biggest one that you can afford." Take a look at the regular Tom's article "Best SSDs for the money." I am agnostic as to brands and controllers.

I get Rapid Storage Technology mixed up with that other thing that uses a small SSD to cache your HDD. Yes, I have the RST drivers installed in Win7. It's a good idea.

Go through the stickied article at the top of this forum with a list of SSD issues and get an idea of the important issues when installing Win7 on an SSD. In my mind, the two most important (because they are hard mistakes to undo) is to have the SSD be the only drive attached to the system when you install Win7, and set the motherboard controllers to AHCI mode instead of the default IDE mode before doing the install.

Have fun.

 

[JohnnyLucky]

SATA 3 6Gb/s solid state drives are backward compatible with SATA 2 3Gb/s motherboards. No problem!

SATA 3 6Gb/s ssd performance will be reduced a little bit when a motherboard only supports SATA 2 3Gb/s. You will probably not notice the slight difference during ordinary everyday use.

The current consensus is purchase the largest capacity solid state drive you can afford.

If reliability and stability are important to you then the Samsung 830 ssd is an excellent choice.

 

[tpepl626]

After many hours of research the last few months, I have discovered that the crucial drives have the highest reliability rating/price ratio. They are cheap as heck on newegg right now as well.

 

[IntelEnthusiast]

Don't forget to look into the new Intel® SSD 330 drives. The Intel SSD 330 120GB compares well with the Crusial M4 drive. Now since they are Intel drives you have the reliability of Intel behind them.


Christian Wood
Intel Enthusiast Team