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I have a Dell Latitude E5500 laptop, and I'd like to upgrade it to an SSD drive (120GB probably). I'm not sure what kind of SATA controller it has, and I'm not sure how to check honestly.

How do I find an SSD that matches the performance of my SATA controller?

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  • Shopping recommendations are not the purpose of the SuperUser. Please read the FAQ superuser.com/faq
    – EBGreen
    Dec 27, 2011 at 16:06
  • Not the proper question for this site. Please read the faq.
    – CharlieRB
    Dec 27, 2011 at 16:09
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    I've edited the question. It's not meant to be a shopping question, but rather a question about compatibility. Which drive gives me the most performance and reliability for my SATA controller. Is that still a shopping question? (BTW, this is my first superuser post, and the FAQ is vague in this area). Dec 27, 2011 at 16:20
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    to be honest I would change it to a question about how to determine what your SATA controller is (I would imagine that the Device Manager would be the place to start). Then once you know the controller see if you can determine compatibility issues yourself. If not, then you could post a question specifically related to compatibility for that controller.
    – EBGreen
    Dec 27, 2011 at 16:24
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    I reworded the question a bit. Asking for a specific model is discouraged, because the answers become obsolete within a few months and are very localized to your situation. As @EBGreen said, we rather encourage questions about how to find out yourself, so can go search on your own. Also, visiting Super User Chat is always a good idea for personal shopping stuff.
    – slhck
    Dec 27, 2011 at 16:27

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Sigh. A quick google shows the E5500 use a Intel 45 chipset. Googling the Intel 45 Chipset says it uses the ICH9. Googling ICH9 says Wikipedia says it has Sata 3GB/s.

But I could of told you that considering the age of the E5500. Too old to have Sata 6GBs... Too young to have Sata 1.5GBs...

"How do I find an SSD that matches the performance of my SATA controller?"

Open ended questions FTL.

No scoping is only cool in Halo.

It's like a parent asking "How do I find a school that fits my child?"

The question implies performance, which is relative. For example, it is easy to max out the RAM capacity of your machine if you try to load a 10GB file into RAM. No program does that, however. Again, it is easy to max out even the best gaming cards. But that isn't the same thing as performance.

So this makes performance a relative issue. An issue relative to a user's workload. Since you have specified zero workloads to compare performance to, we have to speculate or use the default "I Facebook for four hours a day" workload. In that case, a PATA harddrive will do. So what is the workload we are suppose to measure "performance" against? Who knows.

After realizing what the scope of this question is, the answer is obviously "Who knows?" Only you can prevent forest fires.

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  • You know, the funny thing is that I learned a ton from this answer. I'm sorry my question was so bad. Dec 29, 2011 at 5:15
  • @SamWashburn: Now that I reread my answer, I was probably too harsh :) But I'm glad that you learned.
    – surfasb
    Dec 29, 2011 at 7:13

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