Member Avatar for fuggles

I am updating my personal computer's hard disk to an SSD drive soon, and I see there are two main types of drives, SATA II and SATA III. My computer's motherboard was made for SATA 3GBPS, will a SATA III drive still run on it?

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Short version: a SATA III (6.0 Gbit/s) SSD will work in a SATA II (3.0 Gbit/s) motherboard — the drive and port negotiate the fastest common link rate and the physical cable/connector is the same. As pointed out, you simply get the lower link speed; SATA II is roughly 3.0 Gbit/s (~300 MB/s effective) and SATA III is 6.0 Gbit/s (~600 MB/s) (see Serial ATA spec summary) (Serial ATA).

A few practical points that extend what was thinking:

  • If the SSD can do more than ~300 MB/s sequentially, a SATA II host will cap those sequential transfers, but you still get the huge gains in latency and random I/O over a hard disk — so a big responsiveness win even on SATA II.
  • Check the motherboard manual: some boards have mixed ports (some 3G, some 6G) driven by different controllers. Third-party controller ports (Marvell/JMicron, etc.) sometimes behave differently than the chipset ports.
  • TRIM and AHCI matter: TRIM requires OS + driver + controller support. In Windows you can check TRIM with the command below; a return of 0 means TRIM is enabled.
fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

Also enable AHCI in BIOS before installing the OS (or follow the OS-specific procedure to switch without reinstalling), update the motherboard BIOS and the SSD firmware for best compatibility, and avoid using RAID modes that may block TRIM on older drivers. For background on the TRIM command and support, see TRIM (computing).

Bottom line: buying a SATA III SSD is fine for your SATA II board — you’ll get fast boot and app loads now and full throughput if you later move the SSD to a 6Gb/s system.

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Member Avatar for crunchie

Yes. It will just run at the slower speed.

Member Avatar for fuggles

Ok thank you, I was just making sure that there was no difference in the serial protocol or anything. No hard drive, even SSD can send 3GBPS through the cable anyway. SATA just has that capability.

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