SATA 3 7200rpm in SATA 2 Supported mobo

[Brandxn]

My laptop right now has a SATA 3.0 gb/s 5400rm HDD. I can get SATA 6.0 gb/s 7400rpm, and was wondering if it would run at its 7400rpm and not 5400 somehow? Or would the 6.0gb/s act as a SATA 3.0 running at 7400?

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

The drive spindle-speed will always be as advertised regardless of PC's SATA specification.
If your PC has SATA II ports, a SATA III drive connected to it will only give you SATA II performance.
The higher spindle-speed of the new drive will not boost performance sufficiently to compensate for that.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey there Brandxn and welcome to the community. @Phillip is right. It doesn't matter if your SATA ports are 2 and the drive is SATA 3 or vice versa, because they are backwards compatible. You would be limited by the performance of the older SATA just as @Phillip mentioned. Your drive will spin at 7200RPM (this is not affected by the SATA interface), but either way, you wouldn't lose any performance from the drive, because no HDD can take advantage of the maximum speed which is offered by SATA II, and you still will be able to use it with its full read/transfer speed.

Hope that helps.
Boogieman_WD

 

[Brandxn]

Hey thanks guys. Appreciate the thorough answers and the welcoming to the community. Looking forward to hopefully be apart of it!

Updated post with another question but not sure if it was bumped up, going to double post. Hopefully double posting is not frowned upon too badly..

 

[Brandxn]

My inital question has been answered, but I just have to ask this. This screenshot http://gyazo.com/37ca5327cb9ca57c5f8cab533f78a06d ,using HWinFO the drive controller it states; Serial ATA 6GB/s @ 3GB/s. Is this just saying that it can recognize its SATA 3, but its running at the SATA 2? Before I put in this new HDD, it showed 3GB/s @ 1.5GB/s.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Well I have never used this program before, and I've just tried it with 1 SSD and 4 HDDs (all SATA 3), all connected to SATA 3 ports and it shows "6GB/s @ 6GB/s", so I guess that you're probably right about that - the SATA 3
running on SATA 2 thing. Although I'm not sure why it would say "3GB/s @ 1.5GB/s" about your old drive, if it was SATA 2 connected to SATA 2 port, instead of "3GB/s @ 3GB/s"
Overall, I think that you shouldn't be worried and the drive will definitely be able to reach its max read/write speeds on a SATA 2 connection.

 

[fzabkar]

SATA drives report their supported SATA standards in response to an ATA Identify Device command. That's the command that BIOS issues when detecting your drives.

Identify Device word #76 reports things such as ...

Supports SATA Gen2 Signaling Speed (3.0Gb/s)
Supports SATA Gen1 Signaling Speed (1.5Gb/s)

http://www.t13.org/Documents/UploadedDocuments/docs2013/d2161r5-ATAATAPI_Command_Set_-_3.pdf