Sandisk customer support kindly confirmed that the 240 GB Sandisk Ultra II SSD would be compatible with my Toshiba Satellite A200-1BP laptop but I installed Crucial’s 250 GB MX500 SSD instead. I preferred the MX500 because I noticed that it (launched in December 2017 with very good reviews) was a much newer product than Sandisk Ultra II (two years old) and yet the price difference was only around 10%.
I am not sure, however, installing the MX500 vs Sandisk Ultra II resulted in any significant difference on the Toshiba Satellite A200-1BP. The MX500 very significantly reduced the boot time of the laptop (it took the laptop as long as 5 minutes to get fully usable, but now around 45 seconds and I am planning to take some further measures to reduce that a bit further) as well as the launch times of individual programs.
Yet, the reading / writing speeds provided by CrystalDiskMark is nowhere near the advertised values for sequential reads/writes for the MX500. CrysalDiskMark shows 120-130 MB/s vs 500-550 MB/s advertised. This is probably mainly due to the Toshiba Satellite A200-1BP being a very old model (I think I had bought it back in 2007!). But given that Satellite A200-1BP has a SATA-2 interface and the theoretical maximum bandwidth of the SATA-2 interface is 3 Mbps = 0.375 MB/s, I was expecting a bit better performance!
Alper
