ANy reason to plug in a SSD designed for SATAII into SATAIII port?

[WintersEdge]

I just bought a Kingston SSDNow V+100 96gb for a very nice deal. It's going into my SB build (2500k on a asus p8h67-m evo motherboard). I have not installed any OS or anything yet; in fact, I have not even plugged in the SSD yet. So, would it make my drive slightly faster if I plug it into the 6gb sata3 port, rather than the sata2 port? IIRC, some of the anandtech reviews gave me the impression that the performance is a little better using the 6gb sata3 port even with SSDs made for the sata2 interface. Yes or no?

Thanks.

 

[dma0991]

It won't make a huge difference as it won't over saturate the SATA 3Gb/s which has a limit of 300MB/s. Then again if you have a vacant SATA 6Gb/s port just use it, though you won't notice a huge performance boost if you plug that Kingston SSD to the SATA 6Gb/s port.

 

[Emulex]

no the toshiba controller is too slow. save your sata 6gbps for faster drives and install it on the sata2 port man. so you dont have to move things around later.

 

[groberts101]

I would just put it on the first port. Drivers are identical and no issue with swapping it around later on if you ever upgrade to a sata3 SSD.

Only other sata2 drives I've ever seen gain a few MB/s from sata3 are the Vertex LE's.

 

[mpx999]

6Gbps ports are different circuits, designed for speed, not cost-cutting like 3Gbps ports, so they should be faster anyway.

 

[groberts101]

LOL. as Emulex already pointed out.. those controllers won't even come close to saturating sata2 much less sata3.

So hooking up a drive(any drive) that is slower than the sata2 bottleneck won't gain anything even if you put them on sata4 ports.

 

[WintersEdge]

6Gbps ports are different circuits, designed for speed, not cost-cutting like 3Gbps ports, so they should be faster anyway.

Really? That's interesting, never heard that before.

Well, in any case, I do have 2 ports and only that SSD and a "green" storage drive to plug in, with no plans for other drives anytime soon, so I guess I'll go right ahead and stick it into the sata3 port.

It 100% for sure won't hurt, right??

 

[Emulex]

no hurt. but i question the above statement on quality

 

[SickBeast]

OP why don't you run some benchmarks?

 

[Voo]

no hurt. but i question the above statement on quality

If you only have a 3gbit SSD there's really no reason to use a low quality 6gbit port if you could instead use a Intel 3gbit port. Especially those first 3rd party controllers were quite poor.

 

[Emulex]

oh i read that 3gb ports were low quality and 6gbps were not from your statement

 

[cytoSiN]

OP why don't you run some benchmarks?

^^ This.

I haven't benchmarked in a while, but I've never seen a difference in speed between Sata II and Sata III ports for Sata II devices.

Notably, however, different Sata III ports can have different speeds. E.g., my Intel Sata III ports consistently benchmark higher than the Marvell Sata III ports on the same board. If you have options of Sata II ports, I'd use the Intel ports rather than the Marvell ports, but I agree with the above post about not wasting a Sata III port on a Sata II device...if nothing else, you don't want to have to keep swapping plugs later.

 

[VirtualLarry]

oh i read that 3gb ports were low quality and 6gbps were not from your statement

I think that you're thinking of the P67 B2 stepping recall, in which the SATA2 ports had potential errors.

I think that the person that you responded to, was talking about 3rd-party add-on SATA3 controllers, which were and are generally inferior to the in-built chipset's SATA (SATA2) controllers. Like the Marvell 6Gb/s controller, that had so many compatibility problems.

 

[Voo]

Like the Marvell 6Gb/s controller, that had so many compatibility problems.

Not just compatibility problems but they're just slower than e.g. the Intel controller. So using most SATA3 ports on a SATA2 SSD will reduce performance a bit.