Did I plug into wrong SATA?

tomtendo

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Oct 28, 2015
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Is it possible to plug into the wrong SATA connector on the MOBO and have it work, but somewhat, effect your HDD speeds?

I recently built my own PC, and coming from a iMac fusion drive, it felt slow loading certain programs and after the login screen from a reboot. People on this forum said it was because I was use to the SSD speeds, but could it be also that I plugged into the wrong connector?
 

leo2kp

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It can. Some boards have multiple SATA controllers. Mine, for example, has an Intel ICH10R SATA2 controller, and a Marvel SATA3 controller. The ports are sometimes separated by color on the motherboard. What board and drive do you have? Can you download and run CrystalDiskMark against the drive and post the results?
 
No, no hard drive is limited by the sata speeds.
Performance of a hard drive is dictated by the mechanical characteristics.
A SSD is 50x faster in random I/O which is what windows does mostly.
A SSD is 2x or 3x faster than a hard drive in sequential operations.

If you care about everyday performance I urge you to use a ssd for windows; you will never go back.
 

tomtendo

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Oct 28, 2015
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Thanks, I am. I ordered the Samsung EVO 850 500GB SSD. But I was just wondering... if that was possible to the performance I was seeing.