Sata 3gb And Sata 6gb ?

[colormebad]

I have a new asus motherboard and wanted to know if you have to have a 6gb hard-drive for the 6gb sata port to work right? I have four 3gb sata ports & two 6gb sata ports...I already have two 6gb sata cables & four 3gb cables..I have heard some say it wasn't worth the time using the 6gb ports unless i was running a SolidState Drive..I have a 320 3gb hard-drive i will be using for windows & a 2tb for storage....Should i just hook everything up using the 3gb sata?

[mariushm]

Re: Sata 3gb And Sata 6gb ?

You can use any kind of SATA hard drive, in any kind of SATA connector, the motherboard has no preference regarding the type of SATA connector.


Otherwise, just like with most connectors on the board, SATA connectors are backwards compatible.

You can plug a 3gbps hard drive on a 6gbps sata motherboard connector, but the connection will be made at 3gbps so it's kind of pointless (kind of, in real world there are some benefits to plugging a 3gbps hard drive into a 6 gbps connector even though the maximum speed won't increase).

In order to get 6gbps from the 6gbps ports, you need a device at the other end capable of 6gbps and a cable that's made for 6 gbps.

The 6 gbps sata cables have more pins inside the connector and more wires.


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>> I have heard some say it wasn't worth the time using the 6gb ports unless i was running a SolidState Drive

3gbps means the computer can read from or write to the hard drive at a speed of about 3 gbps, minus about 10% in overhead (communication between device and motherboard, error correction info etc) - this means a maximum of 360 MB/s, or about 320 MB/s after overhead is discounted.
6 gbps is twice the sata 3gbps.

The fastest hard drives today can transfer to the computer with about 180 MB/s but there are cases where the hard drive can do short bursts of data at about 250 MB/s.

So as you can see, the normal hard drives can work just fine with sata 3 gbps, there's still room to grow, they're limited by the rotation of the disks inside and the physics, moving the disk heads inside and so on.

SSD drives don't have moving parts inside and they can access the data very fast, so they can achieve even 400-600 MB/s, which is more than what the 3gbps sata cables can do. So definitely, for SSD drives, if they're equiped with a 6gbps sata connector, you should plug them in a 6gbps sata connector on the motherboard, using a 6gbps sata cable.
The majority of the cheaper SSD drives still come with 3gbps sata connectors, so for those there is a benefit to plugging them in a 6gbps connector on the motherboard, but they'll work at a maximum of 3 gbps.

The benefit is... well, disk controllers vary in performance, some have more brains, some are slightly slower - even though the cable can do 3gbps, they may not be able to actually process, correct errors in the data they receive and send everything to the operating system fast enough. So they may actually only be able to process 200-250 MB/s, for example.
6gbps controllers (the chips on motherboard) are newer designs, which may have a bit more power to process and check the data received through the cables from hard drives, so even though the drive is connected at 3 gbps, they may work a bit better.

[colormebad]

Re: Sata 3gb And Sata 6gb ?

You can use any kind of SATA hard drive, in any kind of SATA connector, the motherboard has no preference regarding the type of SATA connector.


Otherwise, just like with most connectors on the board, SATA connectors are backwards compatible.

You can plug a 3gbps hard drive on a 6gbps sata motherboard connector, but the connection will be made at 3gbps so it's kind of pointless (kind of, in real world there are some benefits to plugging a 3gbps hard drive into a 6 gbps connector even though the maximum speed won't increase).

In order to get 6gbps from the 6gbps ports, you need a device at the other end capable of 6gbps and a cable that's made for 6 gbps.

The 6 gbps sata cables have more pins inside the connector and more wires.


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>> I have heard some say it wasn't worth the time using the 6gb ports unless i was running a SolidState Drive

3gbps means the computer can read from or write to the hard drive at a speed of about 3 gbps, minus about 10% in overhead (communication between device and motherboard, error correction info etc) - this means a maximum of 360 MB/s, or about 320 MB/s after overhead is discounted.
6 gbps is twice the sata 3gbps.

The fastest hard drives today can transfer to the computer with about 180 MB/s but there are cases where the hard drive can do short bursts of data at about 250 MB/s.

So as you can see, the normal hard drives can work just fine with sata 3 gbps, there's still room to grow, they're limited by the rotation of the disks inside and the physics, moving the disk heads inside and so on.

SSD drives don't have moving parts inside and they can access the data very fast, so they can achieve even 400-600 MB/s, which is more than what the 3gbps sata cables can do. So definitely, for SSD drives, if they're equiped with a 6gbps sata connector, you should plug them in a 6gbps sata connector on the motherboard, using a 6gbps sata cable.
The majority of the cheaper SSD drives still come with 3gbps sata connectors, so for those there is a benefit to plugging them in a 6gbps connector on the motherboard, but they'll work at a maximum of 3 gbps.

The benefit is... well, disk controllers vary in performance, some have more brains, some are slightly slower - even though the cable can do 3gbps, they may not be able to actually process, correct errors in the data they receive and send everything to the operating system fast enough. So they may actually only be able to process 200-250 MB/s, for example.
6gbps controllers (the chips on motherboard) are newer designs, which may have a bit more power to process and check the data received through the cables from hard drives, so even though the drive is connected at 3 gbps, they may work a bit better.

So'untill the ssd drives' price come down some' if i was going to use the 6gb connectors i would need to purchace a 6gb sata drive for the 6gb to serve any purpose....I guess i would be better off waiting on the ssd drives to get a little cheaper for now...Both my drives are 3gb sata h-drives...I will be better off looks like to just use the sata 3gb's for my 2 hard-drives & 2 dvd burners..Thanks for helping me understand some of this...

[mariushm]

Re: Sata 3gb And Sata 6gb ?

Before someone corrects me, sata protocol uses 10:8 encoding, meaning for every 8 bits of data, 10 bits are sent on the wire, as a way to lower unrecoverable errors.

So the actual maximum speed is 3 gbps * 8 / 10 = 2.4 gbps or about 334 MB/s. From this, about 10-30 MB/s is lost on protocol overhead so the maximum transfer speeds you'll see through sata 3gbps are about 300 MB/s.

Back to your answer, you can use 3gbps devices on 6 gbps ports and there's no downsides for this and as I said, there may even be a very small benefit.

It just wouldn't make sense to spend extra money on regular hard drives, just because they are equipped with 6gbps connectors.

I would connect the hard drives on these 6gbps ports even though they're 3gbps devices - when you'll get sata 6gbps devices like a SSD you can simply move all hard drives except the one your boot Windows from to sata 3gbps connectors.

[colormebad]

Re: Sata 3gb And Sata 6gb ?

One other ? is what do you know about the dvd called Intel Smart Response Technology? That comes with my P8Z68-V LE motherboard...Is that worth messing with...thanks

[mariushm]

Re: Sata 3gb And Sata 6gb ?

I think (but I'm not 100% sure) that it means you can connect a small SSD drive (for example a 20-40 GB one, but you could probably use even larger ones only it would not improve performance further) to one of the sata connectors and designate this drive as a cache for a larger mechanical disk.

You would not see this SSD in Windows or whatever operating system you use, but the sata controller will write the most often accessed data onto this SSD drive and then read it from this SSD instead of the regular slow drive.

Something like that... you should read the manual of the motherboard, it should explain it better than me.

[colormebad]

Re: Sata 3gb And Sata 6gb ?

I think (but I'm not 100% sure) that it means you can connect a small SSD drive (for example a 20-40 GB one, but you could probably use even larger ones only it would not improve performance further) to one of the sata connectors and designate this drive as a cache for a larger mechanical disk.

You would not see this SSD in Windows or whatever operating system you use, but the sata controller will write the most often accessed data onto this SSD drive and then read it from this SSD instead of the regular slow drive.

Something like that... you should read the manual of the motherboard, it should explain it better than me.

Yeah' the barebone kit came with a 40gb ssd drive! So i guess thats what it was intended for....Just didnt know if it was worth the time or trouble to set this up...