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Understanding SATA, please help me out.

Last response: in Storage
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I'm new to computers, so sorry if this is a terribly stupid question. I recently bought a laptop with an eSATA port, and after I researched what it does, I still have a few questions about it that I really couldn't find any specific answers to.

1. How do I know if it's SATA 1.5gb/s or SATA 3gb/s(I doubt it's SATA 6gb/s)? And are there different cables for the different SATA versions? Or will any eSATA cable that I purchase have the same transfer speed.

2. When building a desktop, I understand that you can connect a SATA cable to your internal hard drive. So say my hard drive is SATA 3gb/s, what does that speed actually mean? Does that mean if I take something off a flash drive and download it to my internal hard drive, it will be at speeds of 3gb/s? This speed doesn't affect my internet download speeds, right? When I extract a file using WinRar, will this speed affect the time it takes to extract?

Thanks for the help :D  .

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Here's some good background from wikipedia.
1. The HDD will have a label, if it is SATA I, it will likely show SATA, if it is SATA II, it will likely show SATA II. Same cables for SATA, SATA II, and eSATA.

2. The speeds are burst speeds, so yes, you could get those speeds for short period/small file to cache before writing. It won't affect your internet download speeds. It should decrease the extract time for a WinRAR file, but I bet you won't notice it.
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