How to find motherboard SATA spec

[gardenguy]

How can I tell if my motherboard will handle a sata3 hard drive at its 6gb/s rate?

 

[rolli59]

You can always look up the specs for the motherboard at the manufacturers website!

 

[warmon6]

How can I tell if my motherboard will handle a sata3 hard drive at its 6gb/s rate?

Well you would need to know "who your motherboard is made by" and find the "model number" on it.

Once you have those 2 things, you can go to the makers web site and type in the model number there and on there product page it should state if it's sata 2 or sata 3.

Or as most motherboards do (but not all), there will be different sata connector colors on the Motherboard that will mean different speeds. although unlike USB 3.0 where all those ports are blue, the different sata ports color will vary on the maker.




Although i will state that if your just using a HDD and not a SSD, you wont really see a difference between sata 2 and 3 as HDD can not operate fast enough to use such bandwidth.

 

[gardenguy]

Well you would need to know "who your motherboard is made by" and find the "model number" on it.

Once you have those 2 things, you can go to the makers web site and type in the model number there and on there product page it should state if it's sata 2 or sata 3.

Or as most motherboards do (but not all), there will be different sata connector colors on the Motherboard that will mean different speeds. although unlike USB 3.0 where all those ports are blue, the different sata ports color will vary on the maker.




Although i will state that if your just using a HDD and not a SSD, you wont really see a difference between sata 2 and 3 as HDD can not operate fast enough to use such bandwidth.

Thanks for your detailed answer. Perhaps I shouldn't be intimidated, but I was hoping I could find the info under System Info rather than opening the case. In System Information I find "System Manufacturer - Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.". Is this the motherboard manufacturer? If so, then "GA-MA790XT-UD4P" would be my Model #.

Regarding HDD speeds, are you saying that sata 3 hard drives won't really communicate at 6GB/s regardless of motherboard capability?

 

[gardenguy]

Based on my web search, I conclude "System" = motherboard and GA-MA790XT-UD4P is my model #. This system is sata 2 capable, but I'm sure a sata 3 HDD is backward compatible to sata 2.

Still, I wonder about your comment concerning HDD vs SSD speed. This may be too complicated to answer here!

 

[hunter315]

http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3010#sp
Thats the full specs for your board, it has 8 sata II ports but no sata III ports. The sata III hard drives will still work perfectly fine. The reason you wont see a difference with a standard hard drive is that sata II supports 3 Gb/s which is a max of 300 MB/s, there is some overhead in the encoding, the fastest conventional hard drive toms has tested is the samsung F4 with a peak read speed of 159.6 MB/s, well below the capability of sata II so sata III provides no advantage if you are using a standard hard drive, some SSDs can exceed the 300 MB/s limit of sata II.
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2009-3.5-desktop-hard-drive-charts/h2benchw-3.12-Max-Write-Throughput,1012.html

 

[warmon6]

Based on my web search, I conclude "System" = motherboard and GA-MA790XT-UD4P is my model #. This system is sata 2 capable, but I'm sure a sata 3 HDD is backward compatible to sata 2.

Still, I wonder about your comment concerning HDD vs SSD speed. This may be too complicated to answer here!

EDIT:

Man i type slow.


anyways Hunter basically cleared up what i said.

Sorry for the confusion!