SATA III SSD's in SATA II capable system??

I'm wanting to pickup a SSD drive to throw in a last gen notebook. the drive interface in the notebook is a standard SATA, not the little tiny one, but the clearance on either side of the connector is really tight [that's one concern].
but what I'm wondering: the good SSD's are generally SATA III.
Will they be dogs running on that older interface?

 

Well, it would be nice to know what you are running now, make and model and OS and if you currently have an SSD in there already? If you already do have an SSD in there then forget about it, it's not worth the money. After rereading your post I think that you have a hard drive in there, correct? SSD's have the same format as HDD's, 2.8".

 

If you end up buying a SSD that's SATA III, pay close attention to the setup instructions that come with it.

Although some SATA III drives require no adjustments for backward compatibility for use on a SATA II connection, others have a tiny jumper switch that has to be set before installing for the drive to work properly in a SATA II installation.

As for the speed versus price factor, it depends on the rest of your PC and what apps you're running. Generally, the biggest thing you'll notice with a SSD is a few seconds shaved off Windows startup.

If you want better performance on a budget (esp. if your current HDD is 5400 RPM), buy a Western Digital Scorpio Black: 7200 RPM, 16GB dual cache and about $55 street price for a 320GB 2.5" notebook version. Apps should load faster and the effect on battery life is only about 1-2% between charges.

 

The good SSDs are at sata3, but if your computer can't handle them, then it will be at sata2 speeds. Which means, you may just want to hunt for a cheaper sata2 ssd.

We bought 5 Corsair force 80 GB sdds for our old judge laptops. Upgraded them to windows 7, and they act like brand new modern laptops.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233161

I've only seen the OCZ SSD drives, and my current two OCZ vertex 3 (sata3) 240GB drives don't have jumpers on them. Perhaps when I get my Corsair M4 256GB SSD drive, I'll check on jumpers.

 

Thanks for the link, theefool. :cool Prices are really dropping. :major

Bazza

===

 

Note these are we for our judges to use, which basically was windows 7, office 2010, and some proprietary apps (which thankfully worked under windows 7), 2GB ram. So, 80 GB was all we would ever need.

 

Apparently the thing about running a SATA III on a SATA II system is that it will use twice as much power - so your laptop battery would not benefit from the fast SSD. Check out http://www.futurestorage.co.uk/article/TechBlog this guy has written an article about it on a desktop - but more relevant for a laptop I guess.

I suppose if you bought an SSD to put in your old model laptop - used it mainly on mains power and thought you might upgrade your laptop soon then the SATA III drive might be worth going for.