Storage drive questions

[offcenter2005]

What my main question is the asus p8z68 v pro gen 3 only has 2 sata III 6gb/s connections and i have bought one ssd that will use one of those connections and then i bought two wd caviar black 6gb/s 64mb cache sata III drives. I will only have one more connection for the sata III after using one for the ssd. Can i connect one wd hdd to the other sata III and one to a sata II and not lose transfer speed? or is there another way to do this to get optimal performance out of that wd hard drive. sorry about posting the same question twice but this is a better explanation of my problem. Thanks again.

 

[RealBeast]

You can connect both of those HDDs to the Intel SATA 2 ports with no loss in performance, as HDDs do not saturate SATA II ports, much less SATA III ports. Really only SATA III SSDs are faster on SATA III ports.

 

[offcenter2005]

There wont be any noticeable transfer speed? Even if I were to connect that same hard drive to a sata III or sata II it will still preform at the same speeds?

 

[RealBeast]

With any HDD yes, they will be the same on either port, no difference. You can check that for yourself by running Crystal Disk Mark: http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskMark/index-e.html

 

[offcenter2005]

so would you say that buying the hdd with faster speed, unless an ssd drive, kind of a waste of money or do the sata III drives run faster? Ive read other places that these drivesdont even get close to their rated speed anyway.

 

[RealBeast]

A sata III port does not make any HDDs faster, but most now come with sata III ports because of marketing not for performance.

There isn't really any price difference for the sata III port. I find that most drives perform pretty close to their specs, and of course faster rotation is what gives better drive performance between two otherwise equal drives.

 

[offcenter2005]

the 6gb/s vs the 3gb/s if both are 7200 rpm wont make a difference in transfer speed. What about the cache size? does that make a difference in performance? Also this will be a dedicated audio workstation build

 

[RealBeast]

A hard drive cache is important, and most come with 32 or 64mb now. Once you get beyond a relatively small cache though, more will not improve performance much -- so there is really no significant difference between 32 and 64gb, but some of the other drive enhancements do make it perform better. Look at the drive specifications or online reviews to determine the better drive.

 

[offcenter2005]

from what i understand the wd caviar blacks are on top for audio recording. so i think ill be ok with that as long as having to hook one up into the sata II connection wont effect performance. My main concern is that being a hitch in my setup. Thank you for you help.

 

[RealBeast]

Black Caviar are excellent drives and would work very well for that use, just attach both to SATA II ports as SATA III makes no difference.

 

[offcenter2005]

That sounds like good advice? can you explain to me what raid is and if i should do that with the wd's? Now with the ssd drive that should be connected to the sata III for best performance right?

 

[RetiredChief]

The ONLY benifit of placing a Sata III HDD on a SATA III port is burst speed. As pointed out it is really a waste of a good sata III port. Bear in mind that there is not a Big diff between a Sata III SSD on a sata III port verse being on a Sata II port in real life usage.

However this will change to some degree as new hybrid HDDs start coming out that have a small SSD coupled with the HDD. Segate alread has one, a 2 1/2 in drive with a 8 gig SSD inside gor chaching.