Good SDD for SATA 3 Gbs

[vonbosch]

Hi all,

My first post on AT but I have the feeling this is the place to go for this.

I want to buy an SSD for laptop which only has SATA 3Gbs. My question is: should I go for a good all round performing 500 Gb drive (say a Samsung 850 EVO) or a less good 1 TB drive? Or to put it another way, will the performance of the drive matter at all given the bottleneck of the interface? And if some things are not bottlenecked, what should I look to maximise? IOPs?

My use case (apart from general desktopping around on Ubuntu) is running simulation models. This involves looking up data from quite big archives (netCDF if anyone is familar with the format) but not very frequently and not very much data (something like a few Megabytes every few seconds) and writing perhaps a similar amount of data with similar frequency. I guess that this is a fairly light workload so I don't need to worry that too much.

And maybe a more specific question. What about the most recent 1Tb Crucial drives? The MX200 and BX200? They didn't get a good write up on AT, but will that be a problem for the every day and for what I describe above? They do give 1Tb for very cheap...

TIA,

M@

 

[cbn]

What capacity?

 

[Harvey]

SATA 3 (6 GB/S) drives are backward compatible with SATA 2 (3 GB/S) drives. They will operate at SATA 2 speed.

Spend your time finding known reliable models. Then, find the best deal on one of those. With luck, you may find a closeout sale price on an older SATA 2 drive.

Happy hunting.

 

[vonbosch]

Minimum capacity I am considering is 500Gb, but as I mentioned in my edited post I am wondering about a 1Tb drive. The problem is that the 'good' 1Tb drives still feel a little too expensive for me, but I am wondering if a cheap 1Tb will be indistinguishable from an expensive one on SATA II.

 

[MustISO]

There's been quite a few sales lately on larger drives. Whatever you get it'll be faster than a mechanical drive. You know your data requirements best so get whatever size you think you'll need.