Any worthwhile upgrade from Samsung 470 on SATA II?

It has been 2.5 years and my 470 has served me well. Reliable to this moment.

However if I wanted to upgrade to a newer drive would it be worth it? SATA II is fairly outdated now.

I know that in sequential reads and writes Sata II is a definite bottleneck but would I be able to notice/feel a faster drive in my system?

I would be happy if I could shave some seconds off boot/load times, lower power consumption and increase response time! I just don't know what product to look at in my situation.

Any recommendations?

 

Windows 8 with UEFI Boot would be your best upgrade if you want to shave boot times. Modern SATA III SSDs do have faster random speeds which you may notice in SATA II mode though I doubt it's a large difference. The modern drives are mostly more consistent, I'd say get a drive now that you can carry forward to your new machine. I'm personally as big fan of the Sandisk Extreme II, cheap, reliable, MLC NAND, fast and consistent. The 256Gb model is pretty power efficient too. Basically a good all rounder with no real weaknesses other than Sandisk's terrible SMART counters.

 

My Dell E7440 with SATA III seems no faster than my X220 with SATA II.

 

Would a modern ssd open program's faster and load games quicker?

Sandisk looks good. Are there drives though faster/better than this that might still deliver on sata 2?

I sure would like to carry this drive over to the next machine so it would have to be fast!

 

You should see a difference, but not enough to pay $$$ for over what you have (if your SSD is setup properly already).

If you have a small capacity SSD and you already want to carry any new SSD into a new system; get the biggest SanDisk Extreme Pro or Samsung 850 Pro you can afford over 512GB capacity, OP it by 30% and do a clean Win8.1x64 Update 1 install on your new SSD.


This upgrade will be worth it for the O/S, the clean install and the possibility of OP'ing (which you may not have the option on your current SSD to do).

And when you get a modern platform, the either of these SSD's will complement it beautifully.

 

It all depends on price, by the time you move to your next machine, there might be an even faster SSD available. Not much point getting something exorbitant now if you are on SATAII speeds. The high end drives only really differentiate from each other by how fast the controller is (i.e. random performance) or how consistent the performance is, which is to say the difference is fairly small, however, the price difference is night and day. The reason I recommended the Sandisk is that it has no real weaknesses for it's incredible price, there are drives which are faster by about 5-10% at most but cost at least 50% more.

Unfortunately, when it comes to program loading, it is dictated partly by your sequential bandwidth, partly by the agility of the controller and partly by the latency of the memory blocks. I.e. most modern SSDs have only incrementally improved on the last 2 factors so it is unlikely you will get faster loading times between the top contemporary models of SSDs. You will get a small bump in loading speeds with SATAII to SATAIII due to the doubled bandwidth. The difference is maybe a second at best.
That is assuming your bottleneck for game loading is dictated purely by storage, part of the bottleneck of a game is loading assets to the GPU VRAM block, this operation is strongly limited by the speed PCIe bus.

 

Thanks for the opinions guys! What is OP'ing?

 

OP is Over Provisioning.

See:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/sol...pace-does-not-equal-op-space.html#post9743244

 

Overprovisioning or in other words, the act of leaving unallocated space on the drive. This help with garbage collection even when the drive is nearing full capacity or if you are going heavy with the I/O on the drive.

 

SATA3 does help game loading(those with large maps), but usually in 1-2 second~

No point to upgrade unless you run out of space~

 

Yup.. With SATA II, you might as well stick to this as you will hardly see any upgrade...