[SOLVED] SATA 3 SSD on SATA 2 port | Screen load times

[builder2020]

Hey guys! I'm currently running a Samsung Evo 750 - 250GB on a SATA 2. It's capable of 540MB/s Seq. Read as per the website. Of course SATA 2 will limit it to 300 MB/s. I don't do any read intensive work. I was mainly looking at WOW load times, so checked with HWiNFO. From starting WOW and login, to the first time screen load, the peak read rate was only 98 MB/s.

Would I be correct in concluding that everything else being same, changing the motherboard to get a SATA 3 port isn't going to make much of a difference in the screen load times unless the available bandwidth gets saturated first? Of course I'll have to change the RAM to DDR3, because afaik there are no motherboards with SATA 3 and DDR2.

The setup for info (yeah it was built in 2009 ):
AMD Phenom II X4 955 BE
Asus M4A79 Deluxe
Corsair XMS2 DDR2 800 (4GB Dual Channel Kit) x 2
Sapphire Pulse RX560 4GB
Samsung Evo 750 - 250GB
Western Digital Caviar Blue 640GB

 

[lvt]

It seems that the motherboard is a good one and still has a lot of life ahead.

Changing the RAM from DDR2 to DDR3 won't make you take off in speed.

Running the SSD on SATA2 isn't a bad idea (it will run cooler and probably last longer), unless you are in a hurry every single minute (why make your life so hard?).

 

[builder2020]

Thank you! I thought so too. Just that I've been used to 40-50s screen loading times and I've seen people claiming 5-10s. I've tried literally everything I can from whatever I found by searching around. Such times just seems impossible! That's why I wanted to confirm.

 

[lvt]

Thank you! I thought so too. Just that I've been used to 40-50s screen loading times and I've seen people claiming 5-10s. I've tried literally everything I can from whatever I found by searching around. Such times just seems impossible! That's why I wanted to confirm.

WOW has been there when people still use crappy HDDs and everyone was happy.

Personally I would boost the RAM to 16GB and enjoy fora another one or two years (unless the computer decides to quit). DDR2 is cheap now, 16GB RAM should make some significant improvements.

 

[builder2020]

I started off with 4GB. Later on luckily I was able to find someone who was upgrading and so selling off the exact same 2x2 pair.
Right now, the major websites here don't even have DDR2 and those that do are charging a hefty premium. I'll see if I can find cheap DDR2 locally.

 

[lvt]

I started off with 4GB. Later on luckily I was able to find someone who was upgrading and so selling off the exact same 2x2 pair.
Right now, the major websites here don't even have DDR2 and those that do are charging a hefty premium. I'll see if I can find cheap DDR2 locally.

Those who charge premium for DDR2 are criminals

Hope you can find a pair at good prices, your motherboard doesn't seem to accept DDR3 so no need to use DDR3 for it.

 

[InvalidError]

The reason why you are only seeing 100MB/s from your SSD while loading WoW is simply that your CPU cannot keep up with how fast the SSD is loading data. On my i5-3470, my load screens were usually 10-15s. I also had 32GB of RAM, which meas practically no storage IO once most of the zone's assets are in cache.

The price of long-obsolete memory tends to get high when you look at new/shop price since those shops need to make a meaningful return on investment to justify holding on to old stock for so long. The cost of DDR2 back when I wanted to upgrade my Core2 to 16GB was the main reason I ended up upgrading to an i5-3470 back then: 16GB of DDR2 new cost $330 vs $350 for i5+MoBo+16GB DDR3, so it made absolutely no sense not to upgrade and that system served me well until a couple of weeks ago when I upgraded to an i5-11400. Haven't played WoW on it yet, I'm on WoW hiatus until 9.1 gets here.

 

[builder2020]

I'm actually building a new PC soon. After that I'll give the current one to my nieces. Thought I'll explore what options I have in the meantime without spending a ton. Looks like not much, unless I find 4x4 DDR2 for cheap, which is the maximum the motherboard can take.

 

[builder2020]

Thanks you guys for responding. Is there anyway to close this thread, or do we just leave it as it is?

 

[InvalidError]

Thanks you guys for responding. Is there anyway to close this thread, or do we just leave it as it is?

Since you opened the thread as a question, you should be able to "close" it by picking an answer.