[SOLVED] Will SATA2 speeds bottleneck a 15K RPM HDD?

[Genralkidd]

I recently came across a 600GB Seagate Cheetah 15K RPM SAS hard drive and I've found a lot of mixed info about the speeds of these drives. I'm currently only able to connect it to a SATA2 SAS controller which only supports speeds up to 3 Gb/s. I know for ordinary hard drives that's still plenty even for modern consumer drives. But supposedly these 15K RPM hard drives are supposed to be crazy fast, almost matching early SATA SSDs according to some old reports I've seen. So I'm not sure if I need to look into a faster SAS controller or if this SATA2 SAS controller will be sufficient without bottlenecking the hard drive?

 

[USAFRet]

If you have the drive, and have the controller, and have the motherboard....just try it.
See what happens.

Early SSDs were also SATA II.
I doubt this thing is faster than those.

 

[Genralkidd]

If you have the drive, and have the controller, and have the motherboard....just try it.
See what happens.

Early SSDs were also SATA II.
I doubt this thing is faster than those.

I don't have the controller yet, but since my motherboard only has PCIe x1 slots available, the only controllers I could find that support x1 are also only SATA2 speeds. So before I order one of those controllers I wanted to make sure it won't be an issue, otherwise maybe I could go the PCIe riser method and use one of the many x8 controller cards out there. Also you mentioned something about a supported motherboard? Are you saying even with a proper controller card, the motherboard itself has to specifically be able to support SAS?

 

[USAFRet]

No, I just said a motherboard.
Doesn't have to be anything special.

But...>the SATA II protocol won't hamper this drive in any meaningful way.
It is still only an HDD, just a bit faster one.

Personally, I'd only use it if I already had all the relevant stuff.
Having to buy new controllers for it would be a non-starter.

 

[Genralkidd]

No, I just said a motherboard.
Doesn't have to be anything special.

But...>the SATA II protocol won't hamper this drive in any meaningful way.
It is still only an HDD, just a bit faster one.

Personally, I'd only use it if I already had all the relevant stuff.
Having to buy new controllers for it would be a non-starter.

Alright thanks for the clarification! I figure since I already have the drive I might as well get some use out of it. Might actually make a decent game storage drive for older games that don't need an SSD. And if I'm not mistaken about the capabilities of these controller cards, I can always use the extra SATA ports on them to set up some RAID drives down the road.