Sata connection confusion

[Storm Crow]

So I am getting a WD 500gb blue hdd and its 6gb. My computer is Sata II so its 3 gb. So it is slightly bottle necked. But I was wondering are there 3 components to this equation, the sata port, cable, and device. If anyone one of them are below the others it will create a bottle neck.

So my sata II port no matter what I get it will only ever be at 3gb max because thats what the mobo is fitted with? So then at that point I should get 3gb cables and devices because my computer wouldnt be able to take advantage of the 6gb anyway?

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey Storm Crow. You are somewhat right. But you don't need any new cables or anything else. The drive is backwards compatible with SATA II so it's going to be fine.
Just connect the drive as you would have done with any other SATA II drive and you're good to go.

Hope that helps.
Boogieman_WD

 

[Storm Crow]

So even though I have sata 2 ports and cables to go with my sata 3 hdd it wouldnt really make a difference to get a sata 3 cable since the ports are sata 2 anyway?

 

[hang-the-9]

So I am getting a WD 500gb blue hdd and its 6gb. My computer is Sata II so its 3 gb. So it is slightly bottle necked. But I was wondering are there 3 components to this equation, the sata port, cable, and device. If anyone one of them are below the others it will create a bottle neck.

So my sata II port no matter what I get it will only ever be at 3gb max because thats what the mobo is fitted with? So then at that point I should get 3gb cables and devices because my computer wouldnt be able to take advantage of the 6gb anyway?

You will not be bottlenecked by anything since the data transfer rate out of the drive to that SATA connection is well under even the lower 3 gig spec.

It's a bit like taking a car on a NASCAR track that can be run at 200mph, but you have tires only rated for 180mph and you are worried about that missing 20mph you may get with better tires. What you are not even paying attention to is that your 180mph rated tires are on a Honda Civic that is limited to 110mph no matter what tires and road you drive it on.

 

[Storm Crow]

The data transfer rate of the new drive is sata 3 6gbs. The port, and cable are both for sata 2. So how is the drive making the process slower?

 

[Boogieman_WD]

The SATA II interface has a maximum of 300MB/s transfer rate and the drive has about 150MB/s transfer rate. This means that even if you connect it to a SATA II port, the drive would still reach its maximum transfer speed.

 

[Storm Crow]

The drive im getting is a wd 500g blue hdd. And you are saying that it has a 150mb transfer rate and the sata 2 has a max transfer of 300mb transfer rate. So either way it will reach its max? On newegg it says its interface is 6gbs though. So it would have 600mbs right?

 

[Boogieman_WD]

The SATA III interface is 6 Gbit/s which means that it allows data to be transferred with the maximum transfer speed of 600 MB/s. But no HDD can reach such high transfer speed. An SSD (Solid State Drive) can take advantage of such high transfer rate, but no HDD would be bottlenecked by a SATA II port.
In other words the drive you'll get has a SATA III interface, but it can't reach the maximum allowed transfer rate limit of the SATA III interface and it would be about 150MB/s which is the transfer speed of a WD Blue drive.

Hope that clears things up a bit.

PS: @hang-the-9 did pretty well explaining it by using this comparison

 

[Storm Crow]

Yeah hang9 did have a good analogy but he lost me because I wasnt understanding how my drive wouldnt reach the speed that the sata 3 6gb could allow. I got it now though. Ty all.

 

[hang-the-9]

Yeah hang9 did have a good analogy but he lost me because I wasnt understanding how my drive wouldnt reach the speed that the sata 3 6gb could allow. I got it now though. Ty all.

Yes, I tried to explain things but if you had something set in your mind it may not have helped at first.

The computer interfaces, like SATA, the PCIe bus, HDMI, VGA, etc.. all have a spec for speed of data transfer and so on.
But, the devices that connect to them do not run at those max speeds most of the time. What you were looking at was the SATA interface speeds, not the actual throughput speeds of the drive.

In order to max out a SATA connection you need several fast solid state drives running in RAID 0.

 

[Storm Crow]

Oh okay. Thanks again hang9.