SATA 6GB

A

AliceCooper

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Mar 25, 2007
Messages
1,478
I was wondering if one were to have a SATA 6GB hard drive and a motherboard that only supported SATA 3GB, if they could use the SATA 6GB drive with that motherboard?
 
Yes. It would most likely even work with a SATA 1 port as well. SATA will automatically select the best mode the controller and device both support.
 
And also note that most platter HDDs have sustained transfer speeds under that of SATA I, so you should barely see any difference in performance as well.
 
you will benefit from the 6gb/s connection mainly in cache burst (very limited with the HDD) and also with some improved NCQ commandset that is included in that spec.

hardly worth it for a HDD imo. just run it on 3gb/s port :)
 
You're saying SATA 6Gb/s is the same as SATA 3 Gb/s for example on any rotating drive like a WD Caviar? Then why did they make SATA 6Gbps hard drives? They aren't faster?
 
polive said:
You're saying SATA 6Gb/s is the same as SATA 3 Gb/s for example on any rotating drive like a WD Caviar? Then why did they make SATA 6Gbps hard drives? They aren't faster?
Click to expand...



Pretty much. All rotating platter consumer drives, including velociraptors and the latest super-high areal density drives, comfortably perform within the capabilities of SATA-1 bandwidth, under 150MB/s transfer speeds. Only a few of the newest SSD's can actually exceed SATAII speeds, and for most real-world tasks (using the AS SSD copy benchmark to get estimates) platter drives can manage:

ISO: 47.5 MB/s
Program: 24.8 MB/s
Game: 43.99 MB/s

That's with my 640GB WD black on the AMD SB 850. A Crucial C300 can do 355 peak in sustained transfers, requiring SATA 6Gb, but in those "real world" benchmark tests it can only hit 130/96/133, 3-4x faster, but still within SATA1's capabilities at the moment.
 
polive said:
You're saying SATA 6Gb/s is the same as SATA 3 Gb/s for example on any rotating drive like a WD Caviar? Then why did they make SATA 6Gbps hard drives?
Click to expand...

marketing. And it does not cost them much more to use the new interface.

They aren't faster?
Click to expand...

They are not faster because of the interface. They can be faster mostly due to higher areal density, rotational speed or a combination of the two.
 
and also with some improved NCQ commandset that is included in that spec
Click to expand...

there are benefits, such as what i pointed out here. and asynchrounous I/o as well, which is mainly big for video/real-time apps. but like i said, not really worth it for an HDD. now ssd is an entirely different matter of course.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top