Stupid Question re: SATA III SSD in a SATA II MOBO

[dn89lx]

So I am a total novice, sorry if this is a stupid question. Would there be any performance difference using a newer SATA III SSD drive in a SATA II MOBO vs. a MOBO with SATA III capability?

I have seen some say the current SSD don't use the full speed capabilities so it would not matter. Is this true?

If the read write speeds are say 500 MB/s does that mean the since it is less than the 3 GB/s speed of SATA II it will perform the same either way or are they 2 different things.

 

[OvenMaster]

Sometimes a SATA III device attached to a SATA II mobo will need a jumper placed across some of its pins to throttle it down to SATA II speeds. I have a WD SATA III spinner drive that needs this to work properly with my SATA II mobo.

Other mobos and device combinations will work just fine without any jumpers.... the mobo's SATA controller will automatically negotiate a slower speed with the SSD with no problems.

The best way for you to see for yourself what's happening would be to use a program like HDTune to test your drive with and without any jumper.

http://www.hdtune.com/
The free version is at http://www.hdtune.com/download.html

 

[beers]

Performance wise just sequential transfers will be limited to around ~270 MB/sec max. Other random 4k and similar ones don't approach that level and shouldn't be impacted to a significant degree.

You should still have AHCI features like TRIM available since that feature set was available in SATA 3 Gbps.