Any SATA 3.0 GB/s Notebooks for sale today?

smtsolder5

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I purchased an SSD that is wasted on a SATA 1.5GB/s bus.

Intel X25-M Mainstream SSDSA2M080G2XXX Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

Sequential Access - Read up to 250MB/s

Sequential Access - Write up to 70MB/s

That's why I'm looking for a mobile chipset with SATA 3.0GB/s.

 

frozenlead

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...which is why I said most notebook drives. The cutting edge really doesn't drive the notebook market like it does in the desktop world; the midrange and entry-level gets most of the attention, here. You won't see SATA III for a while.
 

smtsolder5

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I never mentioned SATA III.

SATA I = SATA 1.5GB/s
SATA II = SATA 3.0GB/s
SATA III = SATA 6.0GB/s

I am looking for SATA II AKA SATA 3.0GB/s.

SATA III is 6.0GB/s and won't be in a mobile chipset anytime soon.
But SSDs are evolving rapidly so who knows.
 

frozenlead

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Whoa, woopsies. Sorry about that. Guess I should get more than 3 hours of sleep a night.

Anyway, I can't find any after doing some searching. In some manner, what I said before still holds - even SATA II is too wide for notebook hard disks, which are in most machines. Some of the Sager notebook config pages state you can add SATA II SSDs, but it says nothing about if the board supports the same (though, coming from Clevo, it probably does, but I don't think there's a way to be sure).
 

smtsolder5

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Very cool! Thanks for the link. I checked the Mobile Intel GS45 Express Chipset data sheet ( http://www.intel.com/Assets/PDF/prodbrief/319505.pdf ) and it does support SATA II maximum transfer rates. Laptop manufacturers don't make the maximum SATA transfer rate easy to determine. I believe if I can't clearly see the spec then it is most likely SATA I. If the spec clearly shows maximum SATA II transfer rate then they are proud of this feature and know they can charge a premium for it. People like me will pay extra for it. Too often today they will say that a SATA I or SATA II hard drive will work in the notebook but they don't clearly state that the mobile chipset supports maximum transfer rates of SATA I or more importantly SATA II especially for the newer SSDs. When ever I post a question here about SATA II people always remind me that mechanical hard drives can't take advantage of SATA II maximum transfer rates any way. What most people don't think about is that SATA II and SATA III SSDs can and do. Also the SATA terms are often mixed up when SATA II (SATA 3.0 Gb/s) speed is often confused with the term SATA 3 (SATA 6.0 Gb/s). We can't seem to agree on the terms we use. << SATA I, SATA II, SATA 6, what do you think?>> The problem I ran into was I installed an Intel X25-M Mainstream SSDSA2M160G2XXX 2.5" 160GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) in my Toshiba Satellite P105-S9722 - Core 2 Duo 2 GHz - 17 "- 4GB DDRII - Notebook computer to find out it only supports SATA I transfer rates. This $600.00 upgrade did not give me the performance boost I needed to see to justify this expense. Today I will do a fresh install of Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-bit on the SATA II X25-M SSD. Yes notebook is SATA I and SSD is SATA II. Time for a new notebook! I installed another one of these SSDs on one of my desktops that supports SATA II transfer rates. I loaded Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-bit and found the performance boost measurable.
 
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Actually Sata I is only 1500 Mbit/sec and one byte contains 8 bits so that's 187,5 MB/sec.

Sata II is 375 MB/sec and the new Sata III is 750 MB/sec. So we really do need faster Sata in the future when even faster SSDs will arrive.
 

DJR96

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Excellent question smtsolder5!

I'm in a very similar situation. I got an SSD to upgrade my previous laptop, only to discover it was only SATA I (1.5gb/s) and had some big issues working together. That laptop has since died and I'm looking for a replacement but don't want the same issue again.
I prefer to support AMD. They have the M880G chipset which from what I can gather is fully capable. But they don't have any detail on their website. And their doesn't appear to be any guarantee that any of the notebook manufacturers are actually running SATA HDD at the 3gb/s interface speed. Some have 7200rpm HDD, is that a sure sign? eSATA is 3gb/s, is that a sure sign the HDD is too?
The best I could come up with (with 14.1" screen) is HP's DV4-2049wm or DV4-2140us.

I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting to use an SSD in a notebook. But it's almost pointless without SATA II to utilize the speed advantage.

Can anyone else shine some more light on this topic?
 

DJR96

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OK. I've just had confirmation back from HP support to say the DV4-2045 does use SATA 3gb/s. From that it should be reasonably safe to say that their recent models with the M880G chipset should all be as well.

I also posed the question of Tom's doing an article. Something along the lines of "Which notebooks work best with SSD's?" Investigating interface speed.
Hope something comes of it. ;-)
 

HCurley

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Actually Sata I is only 1500 Mbit/sec and one byte contains 8 bits so that's 187,5 MB/sec.

Sata II is 375 MB/sec and the new Sata III is 750 MB/sec. So we really do need faster Sata in the future when even faster SSDs will arrive.



Sorry, SATA uses an 8b/10b encoding scheme so 1.5 Gb/s is really 150 MB. Likewise, 6 Gb/s is 600 MB.
 
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I have been chasing SATA III notebooks for past days and so far I only managed to find ASUS ZENBOOK UX series, where they directly state support for SATA revision 3.0.

http://www.asus.com/Notebooks/Superior_Mobility/ASUS_ZENBOOK_UX31E/#specifications

Unfortunately, this series are ultralight & portable netbooks of maximum 13" screen size, they do not offer quad core i7 nor any high-end graphic cards. I believe somebody who seek performance of this kind would certainly appreciate these options available.

My preferences for notebook would be like 15.6" screen (or close), i7-2670, memory slots of minimum capacity of 8Gb and nvidia 5xx series, plus of course SATA 3. And it looks this combination is yet not available on the market. Each brand seems to have few series of notebooks who are delivered with SSD disk but none specifically states that they do support SATA 3, only the mentioned zenbook, and even so, it is not clear whether the delivered SSD disk is capable of running at SATA 3 speeds, but that is only an issue of replacing it.

Even such high-end series like Dell Alienware do offer only SATA II SSD disks. Although prices there are beyond my reach. :)
 

raviss

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I was also looking for a SATA III notebook. The Dell Vostro 3550 uses the HM67 chipset. According to Intel website, HM67 supports SATA III. Nothing on Dell website about the SATA speed. Is it a safe assumption that Vostra 3550 will be able to transfer at SATA III speeds. If not might as well get a SATA II ssd.