I'm using a SATA II motherboard so any benefits of an SSD would be completely lost afaik
My thoughts on what my computer says about me are that I'm disorganized and lazy, but mildly intelligent with a hint of mild insanity
That's a common misconception..
SSDs are FAST not because of sequential read/write, so the 300MB/s quotes, 1000MB/s quotes, all fundamentally useless to most users..
SSDs are FAST because of Random i/o performance @ 300x that of harddrives.. approximately ~30-50MB/s of random performance on Latest gen SSDs..
This is what makes SSDs feel significantly faster.. and it works just as well even if you're on Sata 1, as long as the controller supports AHCI..
Sorry TP, you were going great, right up until the last line.
While true, it's not as dramatic as you think it is, Csmertx is actually correct in that he hardly noticed a difference.
Math time! (all times used are theoretical).
If your drive is pretty well defragged, access times are minimized. Say you copy one 100meg file and it takes 5 seconds to copy on sata2. The added .1second access time to find the file adds a minimal amount of time to the file transfer. If that same file is in 50 fragments or we use 100megs comprised of 50 files, now you added 5 full seconds to the transfer time. So while access time matters, it only matters on how many files or fragments you are working with. So max time on the ssd is 5 seconds and the conventional can be anywhere from 5.1 seconds, up to 10 seconds. Obviously the SSD helps, but only really shines when the other drive is heavily fragmented or pulling multiple files. There is always fragments, it's usually just a matter of how many.
Ignoring seek times, if you transfer a single 100meg file, if both drives flood the sata channel, the times will be pretty much the same the same with 5 seconds vs 5.1 seconds.
Obviously the ssd does little here.
Now let's look at what happens with Sata 3.
Because it took 5 seconds to transfer, the .1ms access time was only a small percentage of that transfer time. When you switch to Sata3, suddenly you are waiting less time for files to transfer. Instead of 5 seconds to copy a 100meg file it takes 2.5. Your 0.1ms access time is a larger percentage, but still not a very noticeable difference (2.5 seconds vs 2.6seconds), but watch what happens when we add fragments or use multiple files.
On the ssd, it remains s a straight up 2.5 seconds, regardless or fragmentation or how many files you copy. On the conventional drive though, it's 2.6 second starting point is great, until you add in those 50 pieces from earlier, now, it can run as high as 7.5 seconds. The conventional drive is faster than it was before, but it's performance now ranges from almost matching the SSD to taking 3 times as long.
As sata speeds increase, the impact of fragments and access times on data transfer times becomes more and more dramatic, even if the spinner can continue to flood the data channel which is more and more difficult. On Sata 4, the transfer time on the above files now goes from 2.5 seconds to 1.25 seconds on the ssd, and 1.35 on the spinner. However add in your 50 fragments and now you are going from 1.25 seconds of the ssd all the way up to 6.25 seconds on the spinner, it's now 5 times slower than the ssd. The inverse is also true, as sata speeds decrease, the ssd has less impact, which is why Csmertx sees such a minimal difference. When I went from Sata2 to Sata3 (same drive), it was a world of difference. The ssd was nice on sata2, but it took sata3 for it to really shine.
On laptops, the difference happens earlier simply because laptop spinner drives lag far behind desktop drives in terms of transfer and access times. Suddenly stuffing something that makes a desktop drive seem slow is a massive improvement in itself.
TL:DR
The faster your sata channel, the more impact an SSD will have.
