Intel 520 60GB in 3Gbps SATA

[Ovazealous]

Hey there,
Just a quick question, I'm buying a Intel 520 60GB SSD later today, but I only have 3GBps on my motherboard. (I'm buying the 520 so i can use it in future computer builds =p).

The hard drive should work in the 3Gbps? and if it does, what sort of speeds will i be capped at and howmuch speed will I be losing?

Is it bad for the hard drive?

 

[geogolem]

The SSD even when run in a SATA 2 3Gbps configuration will be far superior to a standard mechanical HDD setup. I would say there is a 30 - 40% performance hit by using SATA2 over SATA3 with an SSD like that which can actually push SATA3 to its limits. I'm just giving an educated guess/estimate. Even with a performance hit like that it will still be much better than your typical HDD.

Having said all that i would reccomend getting the 120GB drive instead of the 60GB one. The 60GB one will be a little cramped and typically larger SSD's perform beter than their smaller counterparts.

 

[Ovazealous]

I ended up buying it, the speeds are awesome - capping the Sata 2 (270.9MB/s Read and 259.3MB/s Write) when I'm using All 0x00, 0Fill.
Except when using Random data, my write speeds are almost slower than my Samsung 1TB 7200RPM Hard Drive? Why is that?

 

[geogolem]

hmm, I'm not sure why....

According to the following page: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5508/intel-ssd-520-review-cherryville-brings-reliability-to-sandforce/3

Usually random reads are slowest by a large factor, random writes are faster but still much slower than sequential read/writes. Still in general across all these 4 types of operations SSD's should perform far better than a mechanical HDD. I'll probably google around to see if I can find/understand the underlying technical cause for the disparity.

One thing is certain: DO NOT DEFRAGMENT YOUR SSD - it will cut the lifetime of the drive by a large factor

 

[Ovazealous]

I've turned off all defragmentation forms.

My mechanical drive gets about 134MB Read and 127MB Write (Seq, without 0x00).

My SSD gets about 272MB Read and only 82MB Write (Seq, no 0x00)

With 0x00 the SSD completely kills the HDD tho in speeds =p

 

[danwat1234]

You can defrag your SSD all you want. MLC SSDs can generally handle 100s of Terabytes of writes before bad stuff happens. I have 10.5TB written on my G2 X25-m.
http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?271063-SSD-Write-Endurance-25nm-Vs-34nm/page179post#4460