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I am thinking of upgrading my OS drive to an SSD. As best as I can tell, my motherboard only has SATA 2 (3 Gbs) ports. Is there a significant difference in using a SATA 2 vs SATA 3 port? I realize there might be some bottleneck, but the questions is low large and how often will I bump in to it?

I apologize if this question has already been answered, but I could not seem to find an answer in a quick search of the forums.

Depends on what you do, primarily. And yes, pretty much every time you use more than 3gbs (384 Megabytes of dara per second), the bus will be saturated and do it long enough, and it will be a bottleneck.

most drives cannot saturate the 3Gbits/s.
That said the SATA 3 drives are usually rated 450-550 MBytes/s which leads to 3.6-4.4 Gbit/s transfers possible.

these are peak speeds not sustained.
I've not seen numbers for sustained (I've not been looking) but I don't think you'd likely notice.

Unless you're doing something that requires massive I/O, it won't make much of a noticeable difference, save perhaps when copying lots of stuff to/from the SSD.

The reason here is that linear read/write speed is one of the least important metrics for how responsive the machine is in a regular usage pattern. The real advantage of SSDs over mechanical hard drives are the near-zero response times and the massive number of I/O operations per second (IOPS).

Both characteristics lead to that wonderful "I throw all sorts of stuff at my computer and it never slows down" effect

Obligatory car comparison: linear speed = dragster cars. IOPS = good suspension for curves.

So, don't worry too much about it.

Coming from someone who put an SSD into my old C2D in order to tide me over until my IVB upgrade...get the SSD anyway. You'll still notice a huge reduction in boot times and program load times. The biggest benefit of SSDs is their near-instantaneous acces times. That has nothing to do with SATA2 vs SATA3.
SATA2 will limit read speeds (less so with writes) compared to SATA3, but I doubt you'd notice much difference even with 2 systems side-by-side.
Here's an idea of what improvements to expect from your system by adding an SSD.

Thank you for all of the replies. In response to the "what I do" queries, mostly light duty office work and some gaming (mostly offline, single player - think Civ 5, Witcher 1/2, etc). Mostly I am looking for faster boot up/load times.

Edit: Basically, I am getting some cash from participating in a research study. I can either get a new CPU/Motherboard/SSD or I was recently thinking of getting SDD and setting some aside for either new Xbox or PS4.


Edit 2: I'm current using a core i7-870 and a gigabyte GA-P55-USB3 MB.

With that being known get your SSD and see that system come back to life.

I don't see the need up upgrade your whole system at this time based on your usage. Just get the SSD for now, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. If not, you can always purchase i5 4670K + Asrock Z87 Extreme3 = $275 + tax at Microcenter.

FYI you would see about 30% framerate increase in Civ5 going from your i7-870 to an i5-4670K. But, as far as boot and load times, you won't notice a difference if both are hooked up to an SSD.

DPete27 wrote:

I don't see the need up upgrade your whole system at this time based on your usage. Just get the SSD for now, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. If not, you can always purchase i5 4670K + Asrock Z87 Extreme3 = $275 + tax at Microcenter.

FYI you would see about 30% framerate increase in Civ5 going from your i7-870 to an i5-4670K. But, as far as boot and load times, you won't notice a difference if both are hooked up to an SSD.

I was actually thinking of going to an i7-4770 if I had to upgrade, as I like the hyperthreading in the i7 line. Although, once again I don't know if I'm paying for performance that I don't really need. I do some video encode/transcode, but nothing too major and usually just queue it up and let it go overnight.

On a separate, but related note, is the 870 ok for Win 8? I am planning on upgrading when I install the SSD.

apkellogg wrote:

I was actually thinking of going to an i7-4770 if I had to upgrade, as I like the hyperthreading in the i7 line.

Based on the usage you've described here, I don't think you'd benefit 40% by going to an i7 over an i5, especially when your Encoding requirements are "has to finish overnight" rather than "need to save x seconds/minutes." (FYI, 40% is how much more the i7-4770K costs over an i5-4670K) But you can look at the review comparisons and decide for yourself. An i5 is still going to outperform your i7-870....

Gaming = negligable difference between i5 and i7
Encoding = biggest difference between i5 and i7 because of effective multithreading support, but you have to decide if the time reduction is worth an extra $100.