Alternatives for SATA III ?

[butremor]

hello
Recently i've been catching up to the hardware world, as i've been out of the loop for several years.
It came to my attention that SATA connections are not living up to their standarts, e.g. SATA III can't reach it's limit of 6Gb/s, even on a 10 000 rpm drive. Same goes for SATAII.
So my question is what is good alternative for SATA drives, that is faster, for desktop pc? Definitely not PATA, i've looked into that. I also looked into SAS drives, but they're too expensive and SAS slots can only be spotted on 200$+ motherboards, which is moot point for budget PC.
So what's left? USB? 1394 (i think it's also some kind of USB connection). Does it makes sense to wire USB drive to use as internal HDD? Does USB standards provide bigger speeds than, say, SATAIII ?
Can you recommend some drives that live up closest to their standarts (i mean SATA II III)?


SSD not up for discussion, i'm purely interested in HDD matter.

Thanks

 

[RealBeast]

The problem isn't the SATA ports, the problem is the device that you are attaching cannot saturate the port -- hard drives, even 10k rpm drives will not even saturate the bandwidth of a SATA II port, much less a SATA III.

USB 2.0 or 3.0, 1394 are far slower than SATA II ports.

While you are not interested in them, the newer SSDs will saturate a SATA II port's bandwidth and thus they benefit from a SATA III connection, but even they don't need SATA III, as most of the time they are doing random reads and writes that don't use all the available bandwidth.

 

[DarkSable]

USB is way slower than SATA - 1394 is a firewire port, used for Apple products.

Also... if you're only putting a hard drive on it, then why the hell do you need faster than SATA 3?

It takes 4 standard hard drives or so to saturate a SATA II port - you'll basically never get a bottleneck from a SATA III port - the data transfers way faster than the drive can read it. That's why SSDs are so amazing - their read speeds can keep up with the data transfer rates.

 

[jemm]

double post

 

[butremor]

double post

Well yeah, cos i'm not getting answers to the questions i ask

 

[butremor]

More opinions welcome

 

[RealBeast]

More opinions welcome

The only other connection that makes any sense for an external drive is eSATA, as Thunderbolt (aka Light Peak) is the fastest external connection in the context that you are looking but very expense and unfortunately still much faster than your devices.

You really should read the specifications for the SATA II and III interface and also the data sheets on the fastest SATA HDDs: Raptors to understand that your limitation is NOT the connection. Look at facts on this -- not opinions.

SATA III 4800 Mbps actual rate after overhead ( http://www.pixelbeat.org/speeds.html ) Raptor 1.5Gbps maximum burst data transfer rate ( http://www.wdc.com/en/library/sata/2879-001165.pdf ).

 

[butremor]

Best answer selected by butremor.

 

[darkspartenwarrior]

hello
Recently i've been catching up to the hardware world, as i've been out of the loop for several years.
It came to my attention that SATA connections are not living up to their standarts, e.g. SATA III can't reach it's limit of 6Gb/s, even on a 10 000 rpm drive. Same goes for SATAII.
So my question is what is good alternative for SATA drives, that is faster, for desktop pc? Definitely not PATA, i've looked into that. I also looked into SAS drives, but they're too expensive and SAS slots can only be spotted on 200$+ motherboards, which is moot point for budget PC.
So what's left? USB? 1394 (i think it's also some kind of USB connection). Does it makes sense to wire USB drive to use as internal HDD? Does USB standards provide bigger speeds than, say, SATAIII ?
Can you recommend some drives that live up closest to their standarts (i mean SATA II III)?


SSD not up for discussion, i'm purely interested in HDD matter.

Thanks

It's the drive that's too slow, not the connection, a standard 7200RPM or even a 10k/15k based SAS drive can't come close to saturating even a SATAII, not to mention a SATAIII.

Only SSDs will ever come close to SATAIII speeds(but they're still pretty darn fast on SATAII as well).

 

[BENORA]

hello
Recently i've been catching up to the hardware world, as i've been out of the loop for several years.
It came to my attention that SATA connections are not living up to their standarts, e.g. SATA III can't reach it's limit of 6Gb/s, even on a 10 000 rpm drive. Same goes for SATAII.
So my question is what is good alternative for SATA drives, that is faster, for desktop pc? Definitely not PATA, i've looked into that. I also looked into SAS drives, but they're too expensive and SAS slots can only be spotted on 200$+ motherboards, which is moot point for budget PC.
So what's left? USB? 1394 (i think it's also some kind of USB connection). Does it makes sense to wire USB drive to use as internal HDD? Does USB standards provide bigger speeds than, say, SATAIII ?
Can you recommend some drives that live up closest to their standarts (i mean SATA II III)?


SSD not up for discussion, i'm purely interested in HDD matter.

Thanks