Class of SATA in an off-brand laptop, SSD etc.

[contango]

I'm hoping the assembled experience of YACF can help me out here.

Back in 2012 I bought what was then a beast of a laptop (quad-core i7 processor, 16GB of memory, 1TB hard drive etc). Needless to say these days there are laptops out there that blow mine out of the water, but what mine really needs is more disk space.

I'm looking at something like a Crucial 2TB SSD (I know Samsung makes a 4TB offering but the price runs to four digits and I don't feel like paying that much). The problem I have is that I don't know what class of SATA my laptop board supports and don't even know how to find out. I've tried my good friend Google and all I'm finding is specific questions about specific motherboards with answers that don't help me much.

Is there an easy way to find out what variety of SATA my laptop has? It's an off-brand product, and the place I bought it from has long since discontinued it. As best I can tell the motherboard is a CLEVO P15xEMx but I can't find an exact match for that either.

If anyone could give me some points it would really help me out   If anyone is familiar with the Crucial 2TB SSD and can let me know if it's worth having that would also be good. It looks like it gets good reviews on Amazon but of course Amazon is so riddled with people saying stuff like "it never arrived, 1 star" or some such.

[Canardly]

I thought that all SATA levels were backwards compatible anyway? (RAM is not). Cant help you on the SDD but I do have a Crucial 500MB and it is fine and fast.

[Wombat]

Can't you download and use the Crucial analysis tool from their website?  That will surely tell you what you've got.

[Morat]

Buy a fast one now and use it in your next laptop.

[ian]

SATA is backwards compatible, so any will work. Though I'd suggest something smaller for the laptop and keeping excess data on a portable USB3 spinny drive would be more cost effective and let you invest in some additional disks for back-up.

[fuaran]

Buy a fast one now and use it in your next laptop.

But by the time you get a new laptop, there will be a new faster / better / cheaper version available.

[contango]

Thanks all, I realise SATA is backwards compatible but given the price difference don't want to get something blazing if the laptop isn't going to be able to use it. By the time I replace the laptop (hopefully not for at least 2-3 more years) I'm expecting the price of larger SSDs to have come way down.

I need something big for the laptop because I want to keep my photography files on it. I've also got a couple of 2TB spinny drives as backups. I guess I could use a 1TB SSD in the laptop and use an external drive on top but that seems like more hassle than it's worth.

I'll check out Crucial's web site and see what I can see about a tool. I've been contemplating the Crucial or the Samsung (Samsung also do a Pro version but that adds 50% to the price, so I'm thinking I don't need that one...)

[contango]

According to the Crucial web site my laptop can take 16GB of memory (i.e. it's maxed, which I already knew) and supports SATA III. I didn't even think to look on the Crucial site. Thanks wombat for the suggestion!

[Morat]

Buy a fast one now and use it in your next laptop.

But by the time you get a new laptop, there will be a new faster / better / cheaper version available.

Yes but at least what you buy now shouldn't be totally obsolete. Of course, that does depend on if/when the current machine is being replaced. I assumed (!) that a 2012 machine is coming to the end of its life but I can see where you're coming from.

[Biggsy]

Anyway, you won't be getting a SATA 2 drive if it's new.

Check the maximum thickness the drive bay will take (although I'd expect all very modern 2.5" SSDs to be slim enough for all).

[contango]

It will take a 9mm drive and I think the drive I'm looking at is 7.5mm with a 9mm adapter.

It turns out my laptop also has an MSATA slot. Initial indications from the supplier are that it's limited to 128GB so I'm trying to figure out if that's likely to be correct. It seems like an odd limit, given these days limitations are usually so large that to all intents and purposes there is no limit.

[Biggsy]

How about having both MSATA and SATA drives?  Could be an efficient solution, speed and costwise.

[contango]

How about having both MSATA and SATA drives?  Could be an efficient solution, speed and costwise.

If the mSATA could take more than 128GB then I'd go for that as a boot volume and then use a regular SATA SSD for the data volume. Sadly it appears the motherboard is limited to a 128GB mSATA drive so I'm not sure that's going to be worth doing. I may yet look for an SSD to contain a boot volume and data volume, then use an mSATA drive for swap files, cache files etc so as not to clutter my main drive so badly.