Cuzzin Chizzy

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I was thinking about buying another hard drive for games and wanted to go with something a little faster than my hdd.

Will I see a noticeable improvement loading games from an ssd even if it is on a sata 3gb per second slot on my motherboard?

right now my os is on my other ssd on my 6gb/s port so that's a no go.
 
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Defintely. Besides Read/Write speeds which everyone talks about, SSDs have access times that are 10 times faster than a HDD.
So you will notice improvement in game loads and level loads.



Don't you have 2 6Gb/s ports?


Defintely. Besides Read/Write speeds which everyone talks about, SSDs have access times that are 10 times faster than a HDD.
So you will notice improvement in game loads and level loads.



Don't you have 2 6Gb/s ports?
 
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Cuzzin Chizzy

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I have the Western Digital WD10 EALX-229BA0, it seemed like my speed was a little faster. You're saying I would get the same performance on SATA 2. Why do they have SATA 3 as a feature on this drive? What is the transfer speed of SATA 2?

If that is the case then I might just plug the 1TB drive back into a SATA 2 and get an ssd for my games through the SATA 3. I do music primarily though so I just wanted to make sure I'm not losing any speed on that end. I'm loading huge East West sound libraries from it.
 
SATA 1 (1.5Gb/s) data transfer speeds are from 1MB/s to 150MB/s.
SATA 2 (3Gb/s) data transfer speeds are from 151MB/s to 300MB/s.
SATA 3 (6Gb/s) data transfer speeds are from 301MB/s to 600MB/s.

The data transfer rate for your drive is 126MB/s.

Hard drives can be SATA 3 "compatible", but not SATA 3 "capable".
Your hard drive has a 32MB cache buffer which can briefly (milliseconds) transfer it’s contents at SATA 3 speeds.
Hard drive manufacturers label their drives SATA 3 mainly for marketing hype.

Here’s the link to the spec sheet of your drive: http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-701277.pdf
 

Cuzzin Chizzy

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Can you explain this part more? You're saying that it can work at sata 3 speeds at times?
 
As Dereck47 stated SATA III HDD is just marketing Hype and is basically a waste of a "GOOD" sata III port.
What the 32 mb cache allows for a High Burst rate and this is the ONLY advantage of a SATA III HDD on a SATA III port. The problem is that this is only for a very short "burst" and once the cache is flushed you are then at the normal transfer speeds. Avg through put is less that what SATA II allows for.
 
There have been reliability/compatibility issues with OCZ's "3" series drive for a small percentage of users. If you get that drive make sure you update the firmware on the drive to the latest version.

Samsung 830's and Crucial M4's are great drives if you don't get the Agility 3.
 
Agility III you can stick on a Sata II port, It will work just as well on sata II as it does on sata III. Documented in a review on the Agility III, also confirmed on this my i5-2500k - have 2 120 gig Agillity III.
Only gain for agility III on sata III is if you run a benchmark that uses highly compressable DATA such as ATTO and that is only for the equencial performance (Least important parameter). If you use AS SSD benchmark it scores the sdame on SATA II as on SATA III