SSD on SATA2?

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Master Blaster

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Hi

I'm looking for ways to breathe new life into an older system.

Specs:
Core i3-530 (LGA1156, the only place I can find upgrade parts, like i7-870, is 2nd hand eBay from the UK)
8GB 1333MHz DDR3 RAM (4x 2GB sticks, all slots filled).
500GB 7200rpm HDD
Motherboard: https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-H55M-USB3-rev-20#sp
System is mainly used for word processing and some light photo editing.

Upgrade budget is R1000-R1200.

I'm thinking of getting a SSD like a Crucial MX500, but the motherboard only supports SATA2. So the SSD will never realize its full potential. Is it still worth it? Is there some cheaper SSD that performs slower and more inline with SATA2 speeds that I can consider?

PS: I don't think the motherboard will support booting from a NVMe connected to an adapter to PCIe. Nothing that I can find on Google suggests that someone has tried it before.
 
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Given that mechanical drives are at max speed on sata 3..... no a SSD on sata 2 will only help by using less energy.
 
rambo919 said:
Given that mechanical drives are at max speed on sata 3..... no a SSD on sata 2 will only help by using less energy.
Click to expand...
Wrong, SATA 3 is 600MB/s and SATA 2 is 300MB/s. Which mechanical drives do you have that can do 600MB/s?
 
rambo919 said:
Given that mechanical drives are at max speed on sata 3..... no a SSD on sata 2 will only help by using less energy.
Click to expand...

SATA 2 can do up to 300MB/s.

SATA 3 can do up to 600MB/s.

Seagate has branded the new actuator technology as "Mach.2" and set a new record for a single hard drive with 480 MB/s of sequential throughput, which is more than twice the standard 235 MB/s of the speediest 7,200-RPM enterprise HDDs. It's also 60% faster than the leading 15K HDDs. The new drives are currently geared for the data center, but we expect the technology will eventually filter down to the consumer market.
Click to expand...
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/seagate-exos-hdd-hamr-mach.2,36719.html

So no. And that's top of the line, super expensive business stuff.

Master Blaster, you will get a much more responsive machine from adding a SSD, just get the cheapest one for the size you want.
 
rambo919 said:
Given that mechanical drives are at max speed on sata 3..... no a SSD on sata 2 will only help by using less energy.
Click to expand...

The random read and write speeds will increas substantially though so even though you might not get the best top read and write speed there will be a substantial increase in the responsiveness of the system.

Might not be worth it to replace the old hdd rather just get like a 120gb to run windows from and use the old hdd primarily as storage.
 
I would just get something like the WD Blue 500GB for R999 and then when you do upgrade one day you use that as secondary and a M.2 SSD as your primary which will more than likely be supported by the new MB.
 
Peak speed of SSD and SATA2 for that matter is irrelevant.

It's the access time difference between mechanical and SSD that changes everything.

It's still absolutely worth it to go SSD over mechanical.

Grad THIS or THIS.
 
Master Blaster said:
I'm thinking of getting a SSD like a Crucial MX500, but the motherboard only supports SATA2. So the SSD will never realize its full potential. Is it still worth it?
Click to expand...

Definitely, you will see a huge improvement even on sata2. There are benchmark videos on youtube comparing ssd vs hdd on sata2.

EDIT: You do get pci sata cards that are bootable if sata3 is required.

Look for used cpus on carbonite, examples:
https://carbonite.co.za/index.php?threads/bunch-of-soc1156-1155-1150-cpus-free-775-cpu.249984/
https://carbonite.co.za/index.php?threads/some-old-cpus.239471/#post-1700542
https://carbonite.co.za/index.php?threads/intel-980x-i7.29366/
 
SauRoNZA said:
Peak speed of SSD and SATA2 for that matter is irrelevant.

It's the access time difference between mechanical and SSD that changes everything.

It's still absolutely worth it to go SSD over mechanical.

Grad THIS or THIS.
Click to expand...

^This
I've even used old systems where I've set up Windows-to-Go on a cheap external USB using an old Sandforce chipset SSD and the results were way better than using an old school HDD.
Latency and access times are king.
 
I upgraded a Core 2 Quad with a SSD back in the day - did wonders even though it was SATA2. Totally worth it!
 
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