Will this SSD work with my Mobo?

[articuno1au]

Ahh, kinda.

The files are only in one place. It's just a redirect to a different place.

 

So the files are on SSD:\Cache\Games and HDD:\Steam\Games points over to the SSD lovation.

 

Think of it as multiple sign posts to one place.

[PGHammer]

You're looking at a SATA 6 SDD (the 6 stands for the maximum transfer speed of the device. 6 Gbit/s - 600 MB/s), and your motherboard only supports SATA 3 (3 Gbit/s - 300 MB/s). SATA 6 is backwards compatiable, so you should be able to use that SDD on your motherboard, but it will bottleneck the performance and speed of the SDD.

 

Here is a benchmark of the SSD you're looking at. As you can see, it has a avarage write speed of 452 MB/s, and you motherboad has a SATA board only supporting up to 300 MB/s.

 

 

Still, even if the chipset does NOT support AHCI (some corporate-stable/consumer-stable Intel chipsets, such as some of the G3x/G4x chipsets), the SSD will still be quicker than any standard HDD.  (The easiest example is Intel G41/Eagle Lake.  This corporate-stable/consumer-stable chipset, despite the lack of AHCI support, is still relevant, and even relatively commonplace, due to it supporting LGA775 and the entire Core 2 CPU run in that form-factor - from Celeron Solo to Core 2 Extreme.  Also, exactly how common is AHCI support in portable hardware, such as notebooks?  Remember, SSDs are typically in the 2.5" form-factor, which is not exactly commonplace in desktops.)

 

I'm looking at the currently sale-priced (at MicroCenter) Intel 530 240 GB SSD, even though I still haven't bought a new motherboard, let alone the Haswell CPU for it - as is typical, the Intel SSD uses that 2.5" form-factor, which means it will wind up in the (unused) floppy bay in my mid-tower case.  My HDD is the "weakest link" in my system today (Q6600 is 7.1, as is the 4 GB of DDR2, the refurb GTX550Ti spits out 7.4 for both business and gaming graphics) at 5.9 - the typical ceiling for HDDs (the wacky part is that my boot drive is a WD 1 GB ex-MyBook Eco-Green - not exactly expected to be speedy, however, the 5.9 WEI is seldom exceeded even by HDDs that SHOULD be faster, such as WD's Black and Black2 HDDs - unless RAID is in use).