Any recommendations for an SSD for a SATAII mobo?

Get a SATAIII drive. No reason to limit yourself to SATAII as who knows, you might upgrade next year.

You could get a PCI-SATAIII card to go around this problem.

Just get a SATA3 SSD, it will max out the bandwidth available on SATA2.

For booting and running applications, SATA II vs III doesn't actually quite matter that much. When your OS boots and runs or your application launches and runs, your system is mostly doing random reads of small files, a few KB to a few MB. This activity typically does not stress the SATA II interface. SATA III will only help in reading/writing large files so in these scenarios it won't do much good. OCZ's Vertex Plus R2 is a pretty stable and cheap SATA II drive. OCZ SSDs tend to have problems when they first come out but they get fixed when newer firmware's released, and the R2 has been out for a really long time. Also consider the Agility 3 and Kingston V200 series for inexpensive SATA III options.

Hmm...thought so. SATAII prices are like 10-20 difference from SATA III. Might as well get SATA III.
So, bgrt, Agility 3 is a decent buy then?
I was looking at Agility 3-4 and Vertex 4.
What's all this about sandforce controllers and what not? Do I have to worry about them?

If you can buy other brand don't buy the Agility 3, even I did have one ( it still works) but you have to take a chance on it.

Check out the link for SSD return rate http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?dept...

Buy the 120GB/128GB samsung, intel, Crucial M4, or Corsair SATAIII if you can find one of them in lower per Gb/$.

Hey cin19, what models would you suggest?
Samsung 840 pro is overbudget for me.
Intel - not sure what models.
Crucial M4 are within budget...
Corsair - not sure what models.

The Samsung 830 SATA 3, 6Gb/s solid state drives are worth considering. Samsung has a proven record for performance and reliability. The Crucial m4 is another popular ssd.

I maintain the ssd database listed in the sticky at the very top of this forum section. Here is the link:

http://www.johnnylucky.org/data-storage/ssd-database.ht...

Scroll down to the brands and models you are interested and then follow the links to the technical reviews.

I'll have a proper look through. Thanks!!

This one Samsung 128GB 830 kit for 80 pounds http://www.ebuyer.com/318420-samsung-128gb-830-series-s...


or Crucial M4 for 77 pounds http://www.ebuyer.com/341840-crucial-128gb-m4-ssd-slim-...
if you don't have the b bracket get the one is on the bottom of page for 80 pounds.

The Agility 3 is a decent buy. It's a veteran SSD line and has gone through customer validation (sadly) for more than a year already and is pretty stable. I think the Agility 4 is generally good but people are still reporting issues. Similarly Vertex 4 is fairly new and is their performance line, which you don't seem to need. Agility 4 and Vertex 4 uses a second gen Indilinx Everest controller, which is kind of new. Again you could spend another 20 or 30 more on a premium SATA III SSD like the Samsung 830 or Crucial M4, but the jump from a good SATA II drive to a premium SATA III drive for boot/application purposes isn't really worth it IMO.

About SandForce 2nd gen controllers (like the 2281), when they were first released over a year ago, the firmware was buggy, and people had a lot of BSODs with them, especially with OCZ drives because OCZ was an early adopter of the 2281. These problems have largely been fixed with firmware updates.

Thanks for all the answers

Do not go for the Agility. OCZ Vertex R2 256GB is your best option for SATA II. Got one on my laptop and a brand new SATA 3 Samsung 840 Pro on desktop and i cannot tell the difference.