SATA Compatibility

[havoc2189]

Are there any compatibility issues with SATA 6Gbit/s and 3Gbit/s? I was thinking of buying a 6Gbit/s HDD and running it in a RAID setup with an old 3Gbit/s HDD.

 

[dalauder]

Nope, SATA II 3Gb/s won't slow down an HDD at all. It'll slow down a SATA III SSD though.

 

[pepe2907]

It will slow down only the cached data transfer on any drive, no matter if it's a HDD or SSD.

 

[RetiredChief]

^ Both are true.
The ONLY advantage of a SATA III (6) HDD is in burst speed which does exceed SATA II.
Does the Burst speed really transform to a overall performance increase in day-to-day (real life) - very little, if any.

Sata III hard drives is more a marketing tool - Who wants to market a HDD that is YESTERDAYs capabile.

Editted for spelling - Dag burn keyboard, whish they would type what I'm thinking, NOT what I press.

 

[rand_79]

Are there any compatibility issues with SATA 6Gbit/s and 3Gbit/s? I was thinking of buying a 6Gbit/s HDD and running it in a RAID setup with an old 3Gbit/s HDD.

I would only raid 2 identical drives but that's just me.

 

[havoc2189]

Best answer selected by havoc2189.

 

[pepe2907]

^ Both are true.
The ONLY advantage of a SATA III (6) HDD is in burst speed which does exceed SATA II.
Does the Burst speed really transform to a overall performance increase in day-to-day (real life) - very little, if any.

Sata III hard drives is more a marketing tool - Who wants to market a HDD that is YESTERDAYs capabile.

Editted for spelling - Dag burn keyboard, whish they would type what I'm thinking, NOT what I press.

They actualy say "up to" some 500, even 500+ MB/s sustained speed on "consecutive" reading. But what "consecutive" reading may even mean in a device, where there is no permanent relation between logical and phisical addresses? How it can be "consecutive" if consecutive logical addreses are generaly related to random phisical addresses /and the relation is likely constantly changing because of the overwrite prevention algorithms/?
Some consecutiveness may be achieved only during the first write on a clean and empty device.
But the good thing is - you can never prove it's a wrong claim, because you could never prove you are reading "consecutive" adresses.
Sounds to me as a perfect excuse of why they actually never achieve these speeds /except if the data is cached/.
And how "prolonged" is this sustainability? Is it working for a 1GB file? or it's only sustained on 4k chunks?
And what means "up to" if it's sustained?
...
Looks like a lot of "if".

 

[JohnnyLucky]

There aare no compatability issues. SATA III 6Gb/s ssd's are backwards compatible with SATA II 3Gb/s motherboards. There may or may not be reduced performance depending on the ssd make and model.