SATA 3 or mSATA in notebook?

I am ordering a Sager NP 8270 and I don't know what considerations are involved in choosing between:



120GB Crucial M5 Series SATA3 Solid State Disk Drive

OR

Crucial 128GB CM4 Series mSATA

Thank you

 

Good Question about a very nice rig. See this link for a comparison of benchmarks AnandTech | Bench - SSD
What will be your primary usage patterns, and just curious will you be running Win 7, win 8 or other?

 

Why would you need to chose between them? Aren't they complimentary?

 

Well, I will have a 750GB HDD, plus a high speed drive where the OS and games/demanding applications will be installed. This will be either SATA 3 or mSATA, as mentioned in my initial post.

I will be running Windows 8.

My primary usage will be gaming, but I will be using it for college as well. Is the usage relevant in determining whether mSATA or SATA 3 is better?

 

Here's the SATA 3 SSD:

CT120M500SSD1 - 120GB, 2.5-inch Solid State Drive , from Crucial.com

Here's the mSATA SSD:

CT120M500SSD3 - 120GB, mSATA Solid State Drive , from Crucial.com

What's rather peculiar is that if you click on "Product Details" for both of them, all the specs are THE SAME. Yet on many forums people say how mSATA can be slower than SATA 3 or how it's better to leave the SATA 3 port empty and use mSATA instead for future-proofing....

Can anyone make sense of this?

 

maybe you should think of it this way, OS size is fixed and expands over time by a much slower speed as opposed to Data storage size

as we all know, OS should be (IMO must be) installed to an SSD, and Data Storage should be in a Hdd

now consider the following: SATA 3 port can slot in an SSD or a Hdd
mSata port can only slot in an SSD

given that: data storage expands much quicker

conclude: Hdd runs out of space, thus SATA 3 port runs out
msata stores OS only, thus runs out of space at much slower speed as opposed to Hdd space

2nd conclusion, use msata ssd as OS, as many hdd as possible in sata 3 port for as many porno/ movie/ music/ documents as possible, before looking for external storage

simple? Assmptions made:
1) msata SSD has a live span equivalent to its sata 3 twin
2) real world usage makes no noticeable difference between all SSDs at post 500mb/s speed, only noticeable on synthetics benchmark where a number shows how powerful the SSD is (i mean if you can feel the difference, you are either running some very demanding programs or just placebo effect kicking in)

 

Nice logic breakdown. I am unsure about what you mean when you say that the size of the OS expands over time. Are you referring to updates?

At any rate, this is what I have decided, based on a combination of your 2 conclusions:

1. Don't purchase any SATA 3 SSD for now. Instead, purchase an mSATA for booting the OS and installing games.

2. Take the stock 750GB HDD

3. Leave the SATA 3 ports empty until SATA 3 SSD becomes cheap enough that I can plug in 2 of them in a RAID 0 arrangement (which would probably involve ditching the 750GB HDD, depending on how many SATA 3 ports come with my laptop).

Does this seem smart?

 

Of course, the above solution assumes that the consumer can activate RAID 0 after having installed 2 identical drives (I don't know if RAID 0 is activated via software or if something needs to be done physically to the motherboard)

 

It is actually the other way round..... what I mean by is that:

Your OS expands with updates, new softwares and new games(games playing the biggest part here), and if you do downloadings for movies and music and stuff in general, you are more likely to fill a 1tb Hdd before a 256Gb SSD gets filled, thus my conclusion will be get as many Hdd for data storage whilst keeping only 1 SSD as your boot drive, and since mSATA ports only support SSDs but no HDDs your "1 SSD" is set to the msata slot available to you, and also in current technology pretty much nothing faster than the speed of an SSD is going to get you any performance gain, thus again, 1 SSD only. And all other SATA slots for traditional Hdd to get you as much space as possible for data storage

However if you find yourself running out of OS storage space, I do believe you have a second msata slot to set up SSD raid for extra OS storage (by reading reviews from notebookcheck.net, I believe you have one msata slot upon opening the back cover and another slot hidden behind the primary hdd, meaning that you have 2 HDD slots, 1 optical drive slot, and 2 msata slots, if I'm by any chance correct)

setting up raid 0 should be pretty simple by changing the BIOs boot option and press ctrl + I upon startup to launch the intel Option Rom for raid disk setup, shouldn't need to do that through software which is scary....

see my signature, I setup my raid since I run a dual boot and having 280Gb of games installed other than that being a heavy downloader I filled my hdds to 80% capacity in 3 months

my next major OS space expansion will be BF4 and COD ghosts, which is 4-5 months ahead whereas by my current data storage rate I will run out of hdd space in about 3 weeks time, though my data filling rate is abnormal this can be taken as a hint, that fast but expensive storage space are only needed until a certain level(256-512 Gb), whereas slow but cheap storage space are needed the most (currently running close towards the post- 3 Tb point)

and make sure you do a weekly OS cleanup-image to your hdd if you run a raid setup, just so if the volume fails you get your computer back up running perfectly in the least amount of time, and least amount of panicking

 

Awesome, thanks again!

 

If you only have two SATA ports, but want to keep the DVD drive, then go with the mSATA SSD.

But if you're willing to turn the DVD drive or HDD into an external one, then go with the SATA3 SSD, since they're usually cheaper than the miniature version.