C300 for SATA1 ICH7?

[MrCromulent]

Hi all,

I'm planning to upgrade an old SATA1/ICH7 laptop with a 64GB SSD. I guess even an Indilinx Barefoot drive would offer more than enough performance (I use one in my desktop PC), but newer drives like the Crucial C300 cost exactly the same.

Would the laptop benefit from the higher random speeds (and presumably lower write amplification) of the C300 or would the speed difference be negligible using such an old controller?

In other words: Is there any reason not to put a SATA3 drive in a SATA1 laptop (compatibility issues for example.. I remember some ICH9 controllers not properly recognizing SSDs, but haven't read anything about the ICH7)?

 

[postmortemIA]

Almost every SSD that I can think of has over 133MB/s sequential read and some of random reads, so you will not utilize them well. Your speeds will be locked at that. Even intel x25-v value SSDthat costs less than $100 is too fast for your SATAcontroller. pretty much all SSDs will behave almost the same in your system.

 

[fffblackmage]

If the C300 cost pretty much the Indilinx Barefoot controller-based SSDs, then I guess you might as well get the C300. SATA I is rather limiting to pretty much all SSDs in terms of bandwidth, but at least you benefit from the higher IOPS and much lower latency.

 

[MrCromulent]

Thanks, that's what I wanted to hear! 🙂

 

[semo]

Yep, IOPS and latency what SSDs are best at. You can get high sequential throughput from raiding spindles but real life performance won't improve by much.