Vostro 430 054KM3 SSD Upgrade

Hi Patrick,

Mother board of Vostro 430 contains SATA1, 2, 3, and 4 connectors.

There is only one PCIe 2.0 slot on the mother board.

Please check the image below for complete teardown of Vostro 430 mother board.

SSD drive is untested on these systems, though the slots supporting the installation are available on the motherboard.

Please reply for any furhter help.

Hi Nikhil

Many thanks for getting back to me. Its really useful to see the modo diagram.

I think when its refering to SATA 1,2,3,4, they are just numbers for each connection. I need to know are they SATA II (Revision 2.0 3Gbits/s) or SATA III (Revision 3.0 6Gbits/s). Using a SATA II connection would mean that a fast SSD would not be able to operate at full speed.

Am i right in think that the graphics card is using the one PCIe 2.0 slot? Can it be moved to the PCIe 1 slot?

Hi Patrick,

Vostro 430 supports Serial ATA II-revision 1.1 specifications of the extensions to SATA 1.0a.

If the graphics card is mounted on PCIe 2.0 it cannot be moved to PCIe 1.0 slot, unless you have a separate graphics card that can be mounted on PCIe 1.0.

Thanks Nikhil

Can you just confirm, as i'm very new to all this terminology and there are different ways of expressing things, that what you described above is the same as this (from the Serial ATA Wikipedia entry):

SATA revision 2.0 - 3 Gbit/s - 300 MB/s

Second generation SATA interfaces run with a native transfer rate of 3.0 Gbit/s, and taking 8b/10b encoding into account, the maximum uncoded transfer rate is 2.4 Gbit/s (300 MB/s). The theoretical burst throughput of SATA 3.0 Gbit/s is double that of SATA revision 1.0.

All SATA data cables meeting the SATA spec are rated for 3.0 Gbit/s and will handle current mechanical drives without any loss of sustained and burst data transfer performance. However, high-performance flash drives can exceed the SATA 3 Gbit/s transfer rate; this is addressed with the SATA 6 Gbit/s interoperability standard.

SATA 3 Gbit/s is backward compatible with SATA 1.5 Gbit/s.

Its the transfer rate thats important to me to give better performance using an SSD over a mechanical HD.

Even with SATA II, an SSD will provide a huge increase in speed over traditional hard drives.

The SATA cards should be backwardly compatible with earlier PCI Express standards.

Yes, I think plugged into a SATA II (3Gbit/s) port, even a slow SSD drive will improve performance dramatically, at least that’s what I’m hoping. If the board hasn't got SATA III (6Gbits/s) then a high speed SSD is a waste of money as the transfer rate is much higher than the port can handle. I think this would also be true using a SATA III adaptor on a PCI 1.0 slot. If this mobo is only SATA I (1.5Gbits/s), then in don't think an SSD will be much faster than my existing mechanical HD.

Is “Serial ATA 11-revision 1.1” mentioned in this thread the same as “Serial ATA Revision 2”? There is no mention of a revision 1.1 on the Wikipedia page, I’ve goggled this term but I still can’t work out from the results if this means my modo is SATA 1.5 Gbit/s or SATA 3Gbit/s, which I now understand is the correct terminology. When this has been clarified I’ll mark the thread as answered.

Many thanks for everyone’s help so far.

Did you ever get an answer to your question (from some other source?)

Yes, its whats commonly known as SATA II (3Gbit/s). I got a Samsung 840 SSD, put a clean install of Windows 8 on it and it certainly made a difference. Now getting speeds just under 3Gbits/.