Is SATA II worth it on a 32 bit PCI Slot

The speed limit is in 99% cases in hard drives.

You are stucked now you garra get your self a sataII controller if U mean to use those drives.

Meyb there is a trick i dont know.

I fucked up my friend dont knowing that sataII hdd cant operate at sata I controller(onboard).

The sataII is faster 10mb/s from sataI, not in raid...

good information codesmith. one thing to ask- is it true that buying a sata card is pointless cause it wouldnt be as a fast as having the motherboard with build in sata ports?

Codesmith is partially right, but there are a few things that he fails to point out.

Firstly, the "enhanced" SATA spec, whatever you want to call it, provides for more features than just the 3.0Gbps transfer rate. The problem with the spec is that is only specified technical implementations and communication standard between devices (yes, a simplistic view, but one to get hte point across), but not a certification standard that could be used to validate a drive as "SATA II". The end result is that manufactures can chose which features to include, and which to leave out. Some of these features include eSATA, NCQ, and port multiplying.

Now, most SATAII chipsets implement all these features, so it's mostly that HDD that you have to see which include them and which don't. Depending on what you're using your computer for, having a HDD / chipset combo that implements NCQ can have a very tangible performance gain.

The second point to make here is that there is a performance benefit to SATA 3.0 Gbps, but it's a small one. HDDs have RAM caches on them. the standard now is 8 MB, leaning towards 16 MBs in larger / high-end drives. Well the data transfer from the cache happens a lot faster than stright from the platter. Infact, those caches can flood a 3.0 Gbps connection. Of course, they're only 16MB caches, so that flooding doesn't last long, but it is there. This is while you'll see in HDD reviews both the BURST (RAM cache) and SUSTAINED (platter) transfer rates.

Given all this though, you are still limited by the PCI bus, so you won't get any speed enhancements from a SATA 3.0Gb chipset.

Isn't that what I said?