Are SSD SATA drives backward compatible?

[SHRED]

My older motherboard is SATA II. The new ssd hard drives are SATA III and surprisingly less expensive than the II.

I'm assuming a III will work but I'll only get II speeds?

[earthshine]

1. Yes. It will go as fast as your Mobo supports.

Be sure that the SATA port occupied by the drive is specified as type AHCI (and not IDE) in the BIOS.

I have found that for the older computers, if one uses a Samsung drive and the proprietary magician software included with it, speeds far greater than SATA II can be obtained, at least for some types of reads and writes. (The magician software performs advanced caching of data I/O using about 2GB of RAM. The magician makes a bigger difference on SATA II than III, but as of now cannot be run on Windows 10.)

[SHRED]

2. Thank you

I am running Win10. This is a desktop. I'd opt to reinstall Win7 but cloning sounds way less of a hassle than reinstalling everything.

Any good free cloning software you know of?
I'm gonna get the Samsung - 850 EVO 500GB SSD.

[earthshine]

3. I like Macrium reflect. It gives some more control over partitions than some others.

It's free and it does the cloning job rather quickly. Some cloning software takes forever.

http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

I'm currently using the Samsung Evo line running under Windows 10. The extra speeds from the magician software are generally not missed by me because the drives are so fast anyway.

My experience is that the Samsungs are the best for speed and reliability. I've had a few high-end Intel SSDs turn to bricks on me.

Good luck.

[SHRED]

4. Thanks again!!!

I just need my old hard drive to hang in there long enough to complete the clone.

[SHRED]

5. This software didn't work for me

Had an MFT corruption error.
I ran "chkdsk C: /r" but it stuck at 17% complete.

I used the Samsung data tranfser software on the disk included...no problem.
It's up and running. Much faster.

[earthshine]

6. For that one purpose, the Samsung software is absolutely the best, but ...

the only thing you can do with it is copy from some disk to a Samsung SSD. For the purposes of making backups, if you then wanted to clone your Samsung drive to something cheaper, the Samsung software will not work.

On my main desktop, I have several drives that are clones. If I install something, say an app or Windows update, and it causes a problem, I don't have to uninstall. I just refresh that clone from one of the others.

If I ever have boot problems, say because of a bad shut down, I can just grab one of the clones and I'm immediately functional.

These drives are all 120GB SSDs. I keep my personal data – every last bit of it – on another drive that has nothing to do with these clones.

After you get your new drive in order, you really should clone it to preserve your configuration. Microsoft is capable of being absolutely reckless when it comes to their updates.

Welcome to the world of SSDs. They are a joy.