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Thinking of buying a new internal drive.

Have always used HDD but thinking  about SSD.

Will SSD work okay on older machines....?.

Grateful for any advice.

Jocklad

Hi,

Yes, they can work on older machines.
But to get the best out of SSD drives you really need SATA-III
Check how your current drive(s) are connected.
SATA connectors look like this. "Pictures"

You may get an idea in:
Menu > System > System Information and look in PCI Devices
or
If you have no docs for your PC/Laptop
Go into BIOS,
It may show drive & settings details in there


Info:
Most SSD's come in 2.5" format, so may need adapter if you have 3.5" slots
You can also get SSD's in mSATA format, for new PC with slot's on Motherboard
There are even new high spec m2 format, for mini sockets on motherboards.


and interesting things like these to put RAID in a 2.5" format with 2 X mSATA cards

Thanks  Wirezfree.

Will have a good look at that.

Jocklad 

To Jocklad,

You might also want to consider SSHD (Solid State Hybrid Drive).

I hate to disagree with someone on here, but even just regular sata has a theoretical top speed of 2g/s. Not many consumer grade SSDs have a top speed higher than that. Also you might want to get a small SSD and a HDD for mass storge, or if you have a NAS you might think about using that.

(09-02-2015, 03:04 PM)Jocklad link Wrote: [ -> ]Thinking of buying a new internal drive.

Have always used HDD but thinking  about SSD.

Will SSD work okay on older machines....?.

Grateful for any advice.

Jocklad

In a much older machine you might have sata3, altho backwards compatable... won't get the most out of the ssd as you'd want. Altho it's still much better and faster then nearly all hd's. An ssd will benefit the most of a sata6 capable motherboard. But basicly going ssd for more speed is always GOOD. But you will have less space without spending much more money then an hd.

@Austin Payne,

These are my measured speeds on my best PC with SATA3

This is my SSD(Samsung 850Pro):
dave@sm-xh97:~$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda
[sudo] password for dave:
/dev/sda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 1560 MB in  3.00 seconds = 519.37 MB/sec
dave@sm-xh97:~$

This is my HD(Western Digital - Black)
dave@sm-xh97:~$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb:
Timing buffered disk reads: 344 MB in  3.00 seconds = 114.48 MB/sec
dave@sm-xh97:~$

I dug this out of my PC notes, the 3 flavours of SATA(max speeds)
SATA1 or SATA/150 = 1,5Gbps or 150MB/s
SATA2 or SATA/300 = 3,0Gbps or 300MB/s
SATA3 or SATA/600 = 6,0Gbps or 600MB/s

I could use SATA1 for the HD, but for SSD it would be a bottleneck.

Remember they quote Gbps for SATA not MB/s

Okay your conversion rates are off. 1.5G/s = 1,500M/s. Now some SSDs will be bottlenecked by sata1, but not many on the consumer side of things. Now if you start using raid or something then you might start to have some problems.

Sent from my XT1042 using Tapatalk

Meh, I go SSD when ever possible


FTW. It is only a touchscreen laptop. On a Desktop. I just go big and 7200 rpm.

I'm not one to overthink these things.

@ Austin Payne
Those figure rounded for simplicity, but very close, Gbps to MB/s
It is very confusing... bits/sec vs Bytes/sec  do some Googling Gbps to MB/s

Example
SATA 1.5Gb/s (aka SATA/150)

1,500 MHz embedded clock
x 1 bit per clock
x 80% for 8b10b encoding
/ 8 bits per byte
-----------------------------------
= 150 million Bytes per second
in other words:

150,000,000 Bytes per second
/ 1,024
----------------------------------
= 146,484.375 KiloBytes per second
=~ 146,484 KB/s

146,484.375 KiloBytes per second
/ 1,024
----------------------------------
= 143.0511474609375 MegaBytes per second

= 143 MB/s