1.5Gb/s SATA mobo?

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iyzmi

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Mar 25, 2007
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Well, I ordered all my parts for my HTPC last Saturday and just today realized that my SATA HD is 3.0Gb/s while my mobo is only 1.5Gb/s. Now I'm kicking myself because the twice as fast mobo was only $13 more...

First of all, will they be able to work together? Also, will 1.5Gb/s be enough to record live high def TV onto the hard drive? Thanks in advance.
 
You should be fine. First off, a 3Gb/s drive should be backwards compatible. Worst case scenario, there's probably a jumper on the back that you have to adjust.

Second, there's few if any drives that pump data out fast enough consistently enough to require the 3Gb/s speed. They might be fast enough to use it occassionaly, but once the cache on the drive is empty, it probably won't make any noticeable difference. But unless you sit there with a stop-watch, I doubt you'll notice the difference. Even with a stopwatch, you probably wouldn't notice.

Check out the Western Digital drives. They're generally regarded as the fastest SATA drives out there, and they only have the 1.5Gb/s interface.

Clint
 
ignore the numbers, they mean nothing in terms of performance. a single hard drive cant even use the entire bandwidth. and they are backwards compatible.
 
So you guys think I should just stick with what I got and avoid RMA'ing it?

1.5Gb/s will be enough for high def video recording?
 
Your HD will be ok for recording live HD TV, The rest of your HTPC? Processor, videocard, tuner, & ram will have more impact on performance than the HD.
 
You're missing the point (repeatedly). Practically speaking, there is nothing faster than the 1.5Gb/s interface. So unless you're going to RMA it for a Raptor (which will probably double your cost), don't worry about it. And that's still a 1.5Gb/s drive...

Now, there are differences in speed between the drives, and I don't think the Samsung drives are really top end (speed wise, anyway).

I haven't done any HD recording, but I suspect there are a number of resolutions, compression, and bandwidth options. So saying you're going to do HD recording is like saying you want to play games with your computer. Then there's the consideration of doing other things with your computer while you're doing the recording...

Check out this link:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/howto/articles/UnderstandingHDFormats.aspx

From there, you can see that you need anywhere from 25Mbps to 900Mbps. Of course, if you use your entire HD for capture, you'll get anywhere from 14 hours to 23 minutes of capture time.

Hope this helps.

Clint
 
"You're missing the point (repeatedly). Practically speaking, there is nothing faster than the 1.5Gb/s interface."

Isn't 3.0Gb/s faster? I'm also not worried about RMA'ing the HD. I'm considering RMA'ing the mobo so it can support all 3.0Gb/s that the HD supports.

Also, is uATX the same thing as Micro ATX? I looked it up and google said they are but I noticed that on Newegg, the new board I'm considering has different dimentions than the micro ATX I ordered.
 
No present hard drives are able to use the whole bandwidth available from the 1.5 interface, so the 3.0 interface is superfluous at best. I think you're gonna find that a 160 gig hard drive isn't going to hold much video, and that will probably be a bigger concern than interface speeds.
 
Isn't 3.0Gb/s faster? I'm also not worried about RMA'ing the HD. I'm considering RMA'ing the mobo so it can support all 3.0Gb/s that the HD supports.
Click to expand...
The best analogy to clarify the SATA speed misconception is to think of two highways. One highway has a speed limit of 150mph and the other has a speed limit of 300mph. None of that matters if your car can only go 80mph top speed. It will go just as fast on either road.
 
"You're missing the point (repeatedly). Practically speaking, there is nothing faster than the 1.5Gb/s interface."

Isn't 3.0Gb/s faster? I'm also not worried about RMA'ing the HD. I'm considering RMA'ing the mobo so it can support all 3.0Gb/s that the HD supports.

Also, is uATX the same thing as Micro ATX? I looked it up and google said they are but I noticed that on Newegg, the new board I'm considering has different dimentions than the micro ATX I ordered.
Click to expand...

3.0Gb/s is not "faster". What they are referring to is theoritcal bandwidth. Think of Bandwidth as a water pipe. Then think of the water flowing through it as Throughput. Hard drives can't get enough information into the pipes because they are slow (relatively speaking). So it is possible for 3.0Gb/s you will most likely see far less than that if you were to do a throughput test.

You have a 3.0Gb/s "pipe", but you still wont get 1.5Gb/s worth of "water" to flow through it.
 
Ok, I'm slowly starting to understand but if the HD can't put out even 1.5Gb/s then why does it say it's 3.0Gb/s?
 
Because the 3.0Gb/s and 1.5Gb/s aren't referring to the "water" flowing through the "pipe". It's referring to the size of the "pipe".

So that pipe is "3Gb/s big". However the hard drive can't put out "1.5Gb/s of water".
 
So the way I take it: the HD is a pump connected to a pipe. The pipe is 3.0Gb/s big but because the HD is 7200RPM, it dosen't pump out enough information to fill the pipe it's connected to. So basically, there is no point to 3.0Gb/s HD unless you get to the top of the line ones that can actually take advantage of this (10k RPM), correct?

So even if I had both my HD and mobo at 3.0Gb/s, they would still not be able to even get up to 1.5Gb/s, right?
 
That's pretty much correct. You get the general idea.

The only drives I know of that saturate the bus (read - pump enough water) are the Solid State Drives. That or iRam that Gigabye was making but I guess stopped.
 
The only reason why you MAY want to is IF the 3.0Gb/s drive is not COMPATIBLE with the 1.5Gb/s ports. However, many people have said they are compatible and if I remember right they are...

So pretty much you're correct, no real reason to exchange the motherboard.
 
SO...there would be absolutely no point in exchanging my mobo in for one capable of 3.0Gb/s?
Click to expand...

No point at all. even ATA100 would be fast enough. The only thing that would be faster is burst speed, from HDD buffer to the interface. But once the buffer empty, ther drive will hardly go faster than 60 MB/sec, which is far from SATA1.5, and way from sata 3.0.

And since the cache is only 8 megs,(merely 3 high quality 5 megapixels digital pictures), well, it wont matter really.

By always introducing faster devices before the real need actually needed, vendor create false inpression that older HW (read less than 1 years most of the time)is no more good enough.

BTW, if you plan to do HD video, better get bigger HDD and plan on RAID0 to actually get faster performance from your HDD. And for those who will say that RAID0 is no good because you have twice the risk to loose your data... well, for 6 years now, I have yet to have one of my array to fail, but I got 2 single hdd to fail...
 
Yes.

The point in 3GB/s is NOT for single drives.

Even such solid state disks as Gigabyte's I-RAM only have 1.5Gb/s interfaces.

THERE IS NO SINGLE DISK IN EXISTANCE THAT WILL UTILISE THE BANDWIDTH OF SATA3.0Gb/s

Not available to joe consumer for prices less than $stupid anyway. (Some companies however are happy to pay $50,000 or more for a solid state disk).

You can of course read to/from cache at speeds faster than 1.5Gb/s, but that's pretty irrelevant as cache is rarely more than 16MB and the chances of a cache hit on read are remote at best.

The point of SATA 3.0Gb/s is for connecting multiple drives to a single connector. This will not affect the average person with multiple internal drives, even if they are on a RAID 0 array, as these drives will have 3.0Gb/s *each*.

The only time you do connect more than one drive to a single connector is when using a port multiplier (like a USB hub for hard disks). You don't have one of these unless you specifically bought it, or you have an external RAID enclosure.

In short, DO NOT WORRY ABOUT SATA 3.0Gb/s.

You have more chance of Saddam Hussein coming back from the dead to reveal his WMD cache and nuking you than it affecting you tbh.
 
I just received my PC Chips A13G mobo and the manual says it can do SATA 3.0Gb/s while newegg and the PC Chips site say its 1.5Gb/s. Here is a pic of the side of the box:
mobo1.jpg

And a pic of the specs page in the manual:
mobo2.jpg

I don't know whether to set my HDD's jumper to 1.5Gb/s or 3.0Gb/s... Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance!
 
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