Thinkpads Forum

I see some SATA2 SSDs on the market. The T61 BIOS update can only use SATA2, and getting a SATA3 is not necessary, right?

SATA III is backward compatible to SATA II. There is no single SATA III SSD drive that can produce enough speed to max out the SATA II bus. I am in the process of trouble shooting an mSATA III 128gb SSD. I have one in a T410s and I am trying to figure out why the performance is not what it should be. These are the crystalmark benchmark results.

Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 255.798 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 239.995 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 141.259 MB/s [ 34487.1 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 166.309 MB/s [ 40602.8 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 211.416 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 213.903 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 13.579 MB/s [ 3315.2 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 34.794 MB/s [ 8494.6 IOPS]

So is the SATA2 SSD good for my T61?

Olwe wrote:So is the SATA2 SSD good for my T61?

Theoretically yes, but that really depends on the drive. Most of the SATA II drives are old and not very reliable.

Which drive exactly were you looking at?

If that's the case, then I'll just stick with SATAIII. Thanks for the advice.