1.5 Gb/s vs 3.0 Gb/s or 6.0 Gb/s (SATA I II III) for HDD and optical drives

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Tomahawk1

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It seems to me that the rate limiting step in HDD and optical drives is the read/write speed of the devices, not the SATA ports of cables. Would a Blu-ray player or a 7200rpm HDD transfer data any more quickly with a 3.0Gb/s SATA II port/cable than 1.5 Gb/s SATA I port cable? Thanks
 
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Eximo
Most mechanical drives can't output anywhere near the maximum value of a SATA channel, no matter which version it is. Recent 7200rpm hard drives have a large cache which can temporarily provide a lot of data throughput, but in the long run it doesn't matter.

After overhead 1.5Gb/s can realistically carry about 120MB/s That is the output of top end SATAIII 7200RPM drives. Optical drives are generally slower. Fastest blu-ray can only output about 70MB/s

Generally the cables are all the same. It is the controller itself which dictates the speed.

Not quite sure what you mean by blueray player of a 7200rpm HDD transfer.
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Eximo

Eximo

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Most mechanical drives can't output anywhere near the maximum value of a SATA channel, no matter which version it is. Recent 7200rpm hard drives have a large cache which can temporarily provide a lot of data throughput, but in the long run it doesn't matter.

After overhead 1.5Gb/s can realistically carry about 120MB/s That is the output of top end SATAIII 7200RPM drives. Optical drives are generally slower. Fastest blu-ray can only output about 70MB/s

Generally the cables are all the same. It is the controller itself which dictates the speed.

Not quite sure what you mean by blueray player of a 7200rpm HDD transfer.
 
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Tomahawk1

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Sorry, I meant "or" not "of". I am asking to this question because I am trying to change out SATA cables in my case to match my interior color (yellow or blue) and most cables I found of these colors are SATA I. I have SATA II cables in now and my HDD's maxes out around 120-140 Mb/s when doing transfers. Thanks!
 
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Eximo

Eximo

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Most SATA cables are identical. The controller will run as fast as it can without errors with any given cable.

SATA cables are usually .3 meters long and are unshielded. They rely on the wire pairs, untwisted, to take care of noise. There is no real difference between any of them.

Just like network cables. CAT5, CAT5e, CAT6 can all be used as 1GB/s cables. The extra shielding allows for greater speeds at greater distances.

eSATA cables go outside the computer, so they are generally shielded against EMI.
 
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