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SataII versu Sata III

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I read on this forum somewhere the maximum transfer of mechanical drives is 157MBs/s (something like that) and there was no advantage using a 6GB Sata 3 HDD. At the time I was researching something else and cannot find that post.

So my question is, what would be the point of buying Sata 3 HDDs? It would seem alot cheaper just to get the
3 GB Sata II.

Appreciate anyone's input on this. Also want to verify if you can use Sata III on Sata II ports.

Thanks,

Lauri

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Storage Expert

What you read is correct. A mechanical drive can not spin fast enough to read or write enough data to saturate a SATA 2 ( 3Gb/s ) interface much less a SATA 3 ( 6Gb/s ) interface. Now very small amounts of data can be sent from the drive cache at a faster speed but overall SATA 2 is fine for any mechanical drive. The interface is what's SATA 3 not the drive, just because it's cheaper to make everything to a standard.

Now a SATA 3 SSD can take full advantage of a SATA 3 interface. SSDs are the real reason for the faster interfaces.

All SATA is backwards compatible.
Storage Expert

When you are buying hard drives and you have a choice between a sata2 drive and a sata3 drive which would you buy. I would buy the sata3 drive because it's most likely the newer made drive and may run a bit faster then the sata2 drive.
The 256gb SSD is in my opinion the best option for the Primary OS drive because it's large enough to hold the OS , some games and your most used applications. Right now on Newegg you can get a 256gb Samsung 830 for $160 and that's the best price I have ever seen for a top quality SSD. If your looking to buy a SSD right now I would definetly jump all over that deal.
The Western Digital Black is one of the better conventional drives right now and you can get it in 1tb or 1.5 tb.
The Western Digital Veloceraptor is at the top of the heap for conventional hard drives at 10,000 rpm is a very fast drive and you can get them in 1 tb size. They are more expensive then regular hard drives but very fast.
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One last question on HDD. I have alot of stored/saved data, almost 1TB and that doesnt include any new stuff. So I want at least 2TB for storage. Is it better to buy 2 1TB HDD or just get 1 HDD at 2TB? Not sure if its slower with the bigger drive.

Storage Expert

No, actually the larger drive should actually be slightly faster but not noticeably.

The question is how comfortable are you with your data on a single drive? Personally I have 4 mechanical storage drives as well as my SSD and 2 additional external drives just so a single event like a lightning strike can't destroy everything at once. Things like some pictures I can't replace are even burned to DVDs and stored at a relatives house. Call me paranoid but I learned the hard way over the years that hard drives die at the worst times.

You don't want to completely fill a drive as it will degrade performance. A good rule of thumb is to keep 20% of a drive free especially with an SSD. That will assure TRIM and garbage collection can work correctly.
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