SATA I and SSD

[sailingtaz]

I?ve a 2 year old HP Pavillion DV9700 laptop which has the older SATA I. I?m considering buying Crucial 128GB SSD.

Couple of questions:
- What level of SSD performance degradation can I expect since my laptop has SATA I (not II.)
- Should I go for a cheaper SSD if SATA I is a bottleneck?

 

[zuffy]

It will still be faster than what you're running now. Will definitely bring new life to your old laptop.

 

[pjkenned]

It will be faster, but SATA I would be a big bottleneck for an Indilinx SSD or Intel X25-M which the larger models can read at close to the SATA II maximum bandwidth. You could certainly go for something cheaper though like an Agility (or even slower) since you are going to be interface constrained on the high-end drives.

 

[Swivelguy2]

SSDs will only saturate SATA I when doing large sequential reads. The "whole new computer" feeling is a result of the random-access performance, which still won't challenge the older interface. Therefore, there's still a difference between a great SSD (like the X25-M) and a "just okay" SSD (like the agility) on SATA I.

 

[RollerBoySE]

I have a 2-year old ThinkPad T61 with the same limitation, only SATA-1.

I replaced the original HDD with an Intel X25-M G2 160GB. Boot time for Windows 7 went from 1 minute to 20 seconds. Starting Word (2007) went from 8 seconds to 2.

My desktop equipped with an identical X25-M connected via SATA-2 boots Windows 7 in 15 seconds, so the SATA-1 does constrain the performance, but not by much.

What really matters in the real world is how fast the drive can read/write 4k-blocks, and so far there is no drive available that can saturate the SATA-1 interface when handling 4k-blocks.

 

[pjkenned]

I will say that transfer speed makes a difference too. Just for example, I went from the 8x 15k RPM 2.5" RAID 5 SAS array to a single Vertex to lower noise (relegating all spinning drives to servers) and was patching using some 600-1.6GB patch files that were zipped yesterday. Just for fun I tried it with the SAS setup and the single Vertex SSD took about 24 seconds longer on the 1.6GB patch. One explanation is that the 1.6GB file would take the Vertex 8s to read versus a hair over 2s for the SAS RAID.

Then again, not a fair comparison since it was a lot of sequential reads, and the RAID setup costs over 2.5x as much as the 120GB Vertex. Still, saying the only thing that is noticed is the 4k blocks is very misleading. The SSD feels faster in some situations, much slower in others than the SAS setup.

 

[sailingtaz]

I could save a few bucks going with cheaper SSD but it sounds like I would be leaving some performance on the table if I go with cheaper SSD even on SATA I.

Another question: Is there noticeable power consumption difference between 64gb and 128gb?

Thanks for the input everyone; very helpful and knowledgeable feedbacks.