SSD Advice

[Nefertiti]

Hi Guys,

I have a two year old Samsung x120 and the harddrive is now failing on me. So I started looking at a replacement and noticed that the OCZ Agility 3 120gb is not badly priced, so was contemplating putting that in. I know I wouldnt be able to make full use of SATA 3 but it should be backward compatible right? But apart from that, I could put it in my laptop? And aparently I should have ahci support or I need to run the SSD in IDE mode. Could someone please explain what that means, and how would I tell if my motherboard supports ahci. Initial googling left me a bit confused.

Any advice would be appreciated. Dont want to end up buying the ssd if I cannot put it in my laptop.

tx alot

 

[Pada]

AHCI mode allow NCQ (native command queueing) and TRIM (garbage collection on the SSD), where as in IDE mode you'll be without those 2 things. Without them, your SSD will be slower and would slowly but surely decrease in speed due to no TRIM being done on it.

With a laptop that is only 2 years old, I would guess that it would support AHCI mode.
To check, go into the BIOS and look for the SATA controller mode and see if it is in ACHI/RAID/IDE mode.

 

[Nefertiti]

AHCI mode allow NCQ (native command queueing) and TRIM (garbage collection on the SSD), where as in IDE mode you'll be without those 2 things. Without them, your SSD will be slower and would slowly but surely decrease in speed due to no TRIM being done on it.

With a laptop that is only 2 years old, I would guess that it would support AHCI mode.
To check, go into the BIOS and look for the SATA controller mode and see if it is in ACHI/RAID/IDE mode.

Tx Pada, will go check tonight. I quickly read up on Trim, seems Windows 7 does support it but still trying to figure out if it will work with IDE mode. Anyway. hoping that I have ahci avaialble. all problems solved then.