Can i use a 3.0gb SATA port for a 6.0gb hard drive?

Evoke186 · Mar 16, 2016

my motherboard has two 6gb sata ports and two 3gb sata ports, i'm already using the two 6gb for my HDD and SSD. but i ordered another 7200 rpm 6gb 1tb HDD before i noticed that.

will it still work when plugged into the 3gb slot? and will it be noticeably slower?

Ryan_78 · Mar 16, 2016

it will be noticeably slower but it WILL work. SATA II AND III are backwards compatible, but will run at the slower speed
hope this helped

Evoke186 · Mar 16, 2016

Ryan_78 :

so if i install games on it there will be longer loading times and stuff too?

joex444 · Mar 16, 2016

No, it's a HDD. HDDs can't saturate SATA-II, so there is no difference between running it at SATA-II vs SATA-III that you would ever notice. In theory there is, but this would be for buffered reads (ie, read a file under 64MB then read it again immediately after).

Any loading time in games would be the same between the same HDD setup on a SATA-II port vs SATA-III port.

SATA-II can only slow down SSDs, but even then you're talking about slowing things down to the point its the fastest the SATA-II connection can support which means it's still much faster than a HDD. Since you typically have SSDs being an upgrade from HDDs, the benefit is very real here. In the situation one had two SSDs, one at SATA-III and one at SATA-II, then yes you could notice a difference when transferring files between the two compared to having two SSDs at SATA-III.

Ryan_78 · Mar 16, 2016

Actually I did some testing on game load speeds,M it it really isn't THAT much as halfing, but is is enough to be noticeable when I load games.

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Can i use a 3.0gb SATA port for a 6.0gb hard drive?

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