Do modern SATA-III SSDs work in SATA-150 ports?

[Chicken76]

I have an older laptop and its 60 GB SATA HDD just broke. I'm thinking an inexpensive 120GB SSD (e.g. Kingston V300) would be a perfect replacement, that is if it will work.
The laptop has the Mobile Intel 915GM Express with just a SATA-150 port.

Does anyone know if it works? Specs of Kingston V300 say that it works with SATA-II, but no mention of SATA-1, probably just because it's so old.

 

[ShintaiDK]

They should work.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

Should work just fine if its an Intel controller.

Some other 1st generation SATA controllers can have certain... issues... I'm looking at you VIA VT6421...

 

[.vodka]

The other day I had to install an SSD (a sandisk SSD plus 240GB, SATA3) on an old 775 core 2 rig that needed a breath of fresh air. It had an ASUS motherboard with VIA chipset, the southbridge was the VT8237A, it worked without problems.

Capped at SATA1 and no AHCI it still gave quite the speedup.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

The other day I had to install an SSD (a sandisk SSD plus 240GB, SATA3) on an old 775 core 2 rig that needed a breath of fresh air. It had an ASUS motherboard with VIA chipset, the southbridge was the VT8237A, it worked without problems.

Capped at SATA1 and no AHCI it still gave quite the speedup.

At least the SATA controller in my 2007 Gateway laptop met SATA-II specs. I'd mentioned my "upgrade" for the E475M lappie several times over the last year. It came "refurbished" with a 500GB WD Blue 2.5" drive, and only 2GB of SO-DIMM.

I found the 2x4GB SO-DIMM kit that fit it, and then I replaced the HDD with a Crucial MX100. That led me to purchase a 3-PC license for Romex Software's Primo-Cache, initially for use on the lappie.

It all worked fine. Some folks may be averse to the caching solution. Certainly, the SSD performed pretty well without it: the bench scores showed seq-read at ~250MB/s. Obviously, everything else was somewhat crippled by the SATA controller.

An SSD operating in IDE-mode or as SATA-150 may still provide a speed-boost. Personally, I draw the line at SATA-II, and only for something like an aging laptop. If I want to use an SSD in an old LGA-775 system with SATA-II, I'll buy a separate PCI_E controller for SATA-III. There's even a drawback with that, if the motherboard only features PCI-E v.1.0.

 

[.vodka]

Yes, so do I. I mentioned the need to swap that obsolete motherboard for a G31 based one they have in the same location on other computer that would be better served with the VIA based one here... but seeing the results the owner didn't see the need to make the swap.

Another equal SSD was installed in a G41 rig with an E7500, there the speedup was more than noticeable (SATA2+AHCI here) and was also used as an incentive for the owner to go ahead with the swap. Still he didn't see the need for the time being...


Oh well. At least he knows his investment can be made better in the future. The compatibility of these parts is amazing to say the least, I wasn't expecting that SSD, as unknown as it is (I recommended other disk to be bought), to work with such an old rig. It did without a single problem.