I am planning to buy an SSD for my laptop, but my budget isn't high enough to afford something like a 1 TB SSD; the most I can get on my budget is 240 GB.
So I am planning to go for an SSD, which I will plug into my laptop's HDD port; and I will use my old HDD (1 TB) in my optical drive slot using a caddy (I don't use the ODD).
But then I remembered that my ODD SATA port is 1.5 Gbps or 187.5 megabytes per second (SATA I). I ran a benchmark on my laptop's HDD and it is barely touching 95 R/W speed on SATA III. Would I have any performance loss?
Best Answer
Yes, there will be some performance drop. Negligible, IMHO. Sata I is not only speed, it's also lack of certain features introduced with later revisions.
But, speaking from experience - it doesn't matter. No matter how fast the HDD is, it will be crawling compared to SSD. And, unless you're working with large files constantly, only then you will still have a bottleneck there; any other use and it merely annoys just a tiny little bit.
However, this will be mostly uninterrupted by OS, so I'm fairly confident your sustained transfer will hit max and stay there, without having to constantly switch to service request from system - like paging file...
Just to show you: I have SSD internally and for the time being my HDD is on USB. And 2.0 at that (ports are 3.0, but bungled drivers cause them to not work as that). And I don't mind. At all... Not since my Win7 boots in 22 seconds to login and there are no lags when starting, using and closing programs (including games).