Hi people I currently dont have an SSD, I had a single sata 1tb hard drive and it failed on me, to get back online I installed windows on an old IDE hard drive, looking to get an SSD approx 90 or 120 GB. My motherboard is Sata 2 (Asus p7p55-m). I am looking for the best overall "snapiness" to the system, and my question is how the IOPS rating of a SATA 3 drive will be affected by running on a SATA 2 system. I know the read and write speeds will be limited, but if I compare for example a SATA 2 drive with 50,000 IOPS and a SATA 3 drive with 80,000 IOPS, is the effective IOPS of the SATA 3 drive going to be less on my system? I did see a link to a SATA 2 SSD 120gb for only £40 (A vertex 2 I think it was) but it looks like nobody is stocking it, that sounds like a really good deal. Anyone know where I can get a 120gb ssd for £40?
In brief, Your SATA 3 SSD will perform just as well on your SATA 2, as what maters most for most of us, is small files read/write, and if you look at benchmarks on SATA 3 drives, even teh fastest one you can find at the consumer market, the speed doesn't even come close to SATA 3 speeds. If you work with really large files, likes 1080p Movies, then yes, in this case, you'll be limited. Technically speaking, small file size performance will be reduced as well, but only a tiny bit. Nothing that will be noticeable in real life, even if you had a SATA-3 SSD on SATA-3 controller, right next to you to compare, on my opinion. That is until you run benchmarks, where you'll see it a few points lower. So, if you care about benchmarks, yes it will be a problem, if you care about real life, then no. I am like you, and here is my SSD: Vertex 4 256GB As you see, at the 4K level (this is the area in file size that maters), we are quiet far from the max speed of SATA 2, as you can see from the large file size. Small files size are: Windows, your programs, and most games. So go ahead and enjoy! As for the IOPS. The difference is the technology used inside. You have sync based nand and async based nand chip. Sync based SSD's provide better performance, benchmark reflects better real world results, and have much more write amounts. Definitely worth the extra,
