SATA 2 v SATA 3

[Pablo 54]

I need some backup or correct my information.

I will be building a new rig for a friend next month. He is hung up on SATA 3 for everything. I’m pushing him towards an 80-90 GB SATA3 SDD for the OS and two or three 1 TB or larger SATA2 mechanical drives that I can RAID for him to back up his work. My reasoning is cost and performance. MOBO’s with 4 or more SATA3 ports are more expensive than most MOBO’s that have only 2 SATA3 ports and, from what I have read, you really can’t saturate a SATA2 mechanical drive. (He is not a computer person so where he heard about SATA2 and SATA3 or anything technical is beyond me.)

Am I wrong? As a friend, I am just looking to save him some money.

[Victor]

It depend on the type of raid that you will be using but yeah, you are probably not going to saturate the SATA 2 bandwidth with 2 drives in RAID.

The only drawback with going with just 2 SATA 3 ports is in the future if you ever need more SATA 3 ports, you would need to get an add-on card. For now, it is probably not going to be something tha tmatter much for most people. Other than that, it is probably not going to be something that you would need to worry about.

Based on your post, I presume you are building an Intel system for your friend since AMD chipset do support more SATA ports. So you can easily find a board with more than 2 SATA 6gbps ports.

[James86]

that's what I would do and then tell him the mechanical HD's are hooked up to SATA 3 then whisper Gb/s

[PP Mguire]

Mechical drives by themselves can't even saturate SATA1. 2 in RAID0 will be 100% fine on SATA2.

Even SATA3 SSDs on SATA2 ports are rather quick still.

[Pablo 54]

Gracias. I will give it another try.