SSD on SATA II Motherboard

[Khaleal]

Hi,

I have a Gigabyte h61m-usb3h motherboard which only has 4 SATA II ports.
I currently have: 1X240GB Kingston Hyperx SSD, 1x2TB Seagate Barracuda, 1x500GB WD Blue
The SSD speed in my system is about 200MB/s read/write.. Well. It's supposed to reach 500MB/s but because of SATA II ports it doesn't.
Is there any way to run this SSD at SATA III speeds? I'm aware that there are PCIE SATA III cards but currently all of my PCIE are occupied.
Link to the motherboard: http://ca.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4478#ov

I appreciate your help guys

 

[Solandri]

Don't worry about it. People obsess over the max sequential speeds, but they're not the reason SSDs are fast. Most HDDs top out at about 150 MB/s at sequential read/writes. Even if a SATA3 SSD hits 600 MB/s, that's only 4x faster.

The vast majority of the speedup from a SSD comes from the random 4k read/writes. Most HDDs only manage about 1 MB/s with those. Most SSDs are about 30-50 MB/s. On top of that, if you enable NCQ (allows the drive to handle multiple read/write requests simultaneously), they can usually hit 200-300 MB/s. Which makes them hundreds of times faster than a HDD.

That's where most of the speedup from a SSD comes from. And you'll notice it all happens below the 300 MB/s limit of SATA2. The most important thing in your case is to make sure NCQ is enabled. The drive needs to be in AHCI mode in the BIOS before NCQ can work. If it's not, changing it will make Windows unbootable. You'll need to run a repair to install the correct drivers for your Windows installation before it'll work.

The only reason to fret over SATA2 vs SATA3 is if you regularly copy tens or hundreds of GB of large files back and forth from your SSD (e.g. you work with large video files).

Here are CrystalDiskMarks for your drive vs a good HDD:
http://www.thessdreview.com/our-reviews/kingston-hyperx-240gb-sata-3-ssd-review-crystal-disk-mark-as-ssd-and-anvil-storage-benchmarks/
http://www.legitreviews.com/seagate-desktop-hdd-15-4tb-vs-wd-black-4tb-hard-drive-review_2182/5

The sequential and 512k speeds are over 300 MB/s, but sequential is only 3x faster than the HDD, 512k speeds only 5-8x faster. Your max of 200 MB/s means your drive is about 1.5x faster than the HDD at sequential, 2.5-4x faster at 512k.

But the 4k speeds are 50x faster at reads, 100x faster at writes. 300x faster with NCQing. And those speedups are for the most part unaffected by you being on SATA2.

 

[Khaleal]

That was very informative. Thank you
I indeed have the SSD running in AHCI mode with NCQ enabled.
BTW, Why do most companies concentrate on read/write speeds when marketing their SSDs if it's not that important in terms of SSD performance?

 

[Agera One]

I agree, a useful article.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-upgrade-sata-3gbps,3469-6.html

 

[Solandri]

BTW, Why do most companies concentrate on read/write speeds when marketing their SSDs if it's not that important in terms of SSD performance?

Marketing. Even the units used to measure speed - MB/s - is wrong. They really should be measuring speeds in sec/MB because that's the way we perceive speed. Say you need to copy 1 GB of data.

1) A 100 MB/s HDD takes 10 sec
2) A 250 MB/s SSD on SATA 2 takes 4sec
3) A 500 MB/s SSD on SATA3 takes 2 sec
4) A 1000 MB/s PCIe SSD takes 1 sec.

Going from (1) to (2) is 6 sec faster, even though the speedup is "only" 150 MB/s.
Going from (2) to (3) is only 2 sec faster, even though the speed is more - 250 MB/s.
Going from (3) to (4) is only 1 sec faster, even though the speedup is a much bigger 500 MB/s.

See how the bigger improvements in MB/s actually result in less actual time savings? MB/s is inverted from how we perceive speed. So the bigger the MB/s gets, the less it actually matters.

Both Tom's Hardware and Anandtech have written articles basically admitting this. But they use MB/s because if they post the benchmarks in sec/MB, it's boring. Pretty much all the SSDs look the same, and there's very little difference between budget SSDs and the high-end models. So they use MB/s to exaggerate the benefit of the faster SSDs, and get readers excited and coming back to read their articles (which means more advertising revenue for them).

 

[Agera One]

Another article showing the difference is minor between SATA II & SATA III:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/sata-6gbps-performance-sata-3gbps,3110.html