I'm CONSIDERING purchasing a new hard drive to go from 500GB up to, maybe 1.5TB or 2TB, I'm not sure. My current Hard Drive is a Seagate SATA-II. Thinking a little bit forward, I was considering getting a SATA-III hard drive. I realize that it wouldn't perform anywhere near it's potential due to my motherboard, but I was wondering if in the meantime the two might be compatible. I don't really know if there's a difference in the way the ports look, either.
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SATA-III Hard Drives
- Thread starter JOSHSKORN
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Compatible, yes. But the fastest current hard drives can barely take full advantage of even a SATA I (1.5 Gbps, or 150 MB/s) interface, let alone SATA III. What's more, all of the currently available SATA III hard drives (with the exception of the grossly overpriced 600GB WD Velociraptor) are actually slower in sequential (physical) transfer speed than the Samsung F3 or F4 (both of which make do with a SATA II interface).
OK I'm a bit confused. Even if I had a new motherboard with a SATA-III interface with a SATA-III HDD, are you saying that it still would only run at 1.5 Gbps or 150 MB/s? If this is the case, then what is the reasoning for this? Then what would be the point of buying SATA-II over SATA-III?
All I'm trying to say is that the physical transfer speed of any mechanical hard drive is the limiting factor. Otherwise, we'd have mechanical hard drives that physically and consistently transfer at the interface's maximum practical bandwidth at all parts of the disk.
Also, I've known that the maximum burst transfer speed of a SATA III interface only refers to the maximum bandwidth between the host controller and the drive's cache memory. The transfer speed between the drive's cache memory and the physical disks is a completely different story. This is exactly why you will never see anywhere near the interface's maximum burst speed when you run a physical disk benchmark test. And realistically, the maximum sequential transfer speed on the outer tracks of the disks in a 1TB Western Digital Black SATA III WD1002FAEX or a 2TB Seagate Barracuda XT SATA III is only about 140 MB/s - about 10 MB/s slower than the outer tracks of a SATA II Samsung F3 7200 rpm drive.
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Dangman
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Basically, no mechanical drive in the world will actually take advantage of SATA 6Gb/s due to the limitations of mechanical hard drive design as E4g1e pointed out. There's really no point in buying SATA 6Gb/s hard drives or spending extra for SATA 6GB/s unless you're using a SSD. So even if the hard drive says it's SATA 6GB/s, it's more than likely just as fast, if not slower as E4g1e pointed out earlier, as current SATA 3Gb/s drives.
There are - but most of those are quite expensive, being priced well into the hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. The current Intel 80GB SSD that we've been recommending at the $200 price point makes do with SATA II (3 Gbps).
Old Hippie
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Yes but single drives that pass SATA3 speeds are rare and pricey. However many of use run RAID0 on SSDs and that will also do it.
Let's start calling it SATA6 to avoid confusion, lengthly explanations of speeds, and because it's correct.
Unfortunately, using an SSD in any RAID array at all will completely defeat the TRIM feature, which means that the SSD will die a much earlier death than if the same SSD were configured outside of a RAID array.
As I stated a few posts up, 600 MB/s is the maximum burst transfer speed of the SATA III interface - from the host controller to the cache buffer. The physical (sequential) transfer speed of a mechanical hard drive will always be much slower than that even on the outer tracks where the sequential speed is fastest.