Is A SATA 3Gb/s Platform Still Worth Upgrading With An SSD?
Today's fastest SSDs already bounce off the SATA 6Gb/s interface's throughput ceiling. Does a 3 Gb/s link kill the performance of those drives? We run a number of synthetic and real-world tests to assess the damage when you upgrade an older platform.
Results: Overall Performance
A look at overall performance across our benchmark suite so far makes it pretty clear that there's a quantifiable difference between a fast SSD attached to a 6 Gb/s SATA port compared to a 3 Gb/s connection. As expected, read and write performance are better when you have access to a high-bandwidth link and a device able to saturate it. Duh.
But most of our metrics thus far are largely synthetic. There's a good chance that real-world testing might paint another picture entirely.
If we combine all of our results into one overall representation of performance by weighing individual scores, we come up with the above bar chart, which illustrates the advantage of a 6 Gb/s drive in those synthetic benchmarks.
AS-SSD also has an overall score we can look at. The 840 Pro does take a notable performance hit attached to the 3 Gb/s port compared to the 6 Gb/s connector. Then again, it’s still several times faster than Western Digital's VelociRaptor, currently the fastest desktop hard drive.
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