Upgrading from SATA 1 to SATA 3

2

My motherboard is Gigabyte GA-945PL-S3 and it has 4x SATA 2 ports. I have SATA 1 disk installed and it's slowing my system, I think it is because of its 8mb buffer. I want to upgrade or should I say replace this disk with newer one. For the future I want SATA 3 (maybe for newer motherboards).

I'm confused. If I'm planning to buy a SATA 3 hard drive to use on a SATA 2 port, should I should buy a SATA 2 hard drive for this motherboard instead or there is no difference?

Little Helper

Posted 2012-01-01T09:58:57.427

Reputation: 1 906

Can you explain how it is slowing down your system? – mtone – 2012-01-01T10:16:06.317

@mtone When computer starts using HDD (I can hear the disk and led blinking) the computer starts to lagg. – Little Helper – 2012-01-01T12:18:32.457

Answers

4

SATA3 Hard Drives are backwards compatible with SATA2 so you could get a SATA3 Drive and use it on a SATA2 controller. However, you need to realize the speed differences of SATA2 and SATA3 and how that compares to speed of Hard Drives. SATA2 can transfer data at 300MBps max while SATA3 can transfer at 600MBps max. However, your typical consumer hard drive speed (7200RPM 3.5") regardless of which interface will not reach the 600MBps speeds. Most of them won't even reach the 300MBps speeds.

Below is an image of the same hard drive using the different interfaces.

http://www.overclock.net/t/898768/wd-caviar-black-640-gb-sata-ii-vs-sata-iii

enter image description here

So it does matter on the hard drive being SATA2 and SATA3 but how much of a difference does it really make?

kobaltz

Posted 2012-01-01T09:58:57.427

Reputation: 14 361

Asked: 2012-01-01T09:58:57.427

Viewed: 3 815 times

Active: 2016-02-10T20:43:46.073