Sata Ii Hard Drive On A Sata I Board

[irregularjoe]

I am upgrading my older PC. I built it in 2006. AMD Athlon 64 3200 on a MSI K8N Neo4F mainboard.

Here's the problem: I just bought a Seagate Sata II 1.5TB hard drive. Tranfer rate is 3Gb/sec. My mainboard only supports Sata I which is 1.5 Gb/sec.

I know how to set the jumper on the hard drive to limit the transfer rate to 1.5. But will doing that slow it to a crawl?

I thought about adding a SATA II controller card. I have an open PCI Express x1 slot and a few PCI slots. Would the expansion slots just cause a bottleneck and slow the transfer rate down anyway?

All advice appreciated.

Thanks,

Joe

[jcl]

The maximum transfer rate for current SATA HDDs is around 1.2 Gbit/s. It looks like the bigger Seagates don't even break 1 Gbit/s. I wouldn't worry.

Edit: A PCIe 1.x x1 slot gives you 2 Gbit/s. Probably not worth it. PCIe 2.0 doubles that, though, and might be worth it if you need the extra throughput.

[irregularjoe]

The maximum transfer rate for current SATA HDDs is around 1.2 Gbit/s. It looks like the bigger Seagates don't even break 1 Gbit/s. I wouldn't worry.

Edit: A PCIe 1.x x1 slot gives you 2 Gbit/s. Probably not worth it. PCIe 2.0 doubles that, though, and might be worth it if you need the extra throughput.

Thanks for the reply jcl.

So are the claims of 3Gb/sec on these drives THAT over rated? Clearly that is what they are stating. If you are correct that would be a huge lie.

I'm now starting to reconsider things. The upgrade came about due the click of death sound emitting from the original Sata I Western Digital 80 gig HDD.

I thought I would just patch things up with a new big HDD and an XP re install. Since then I bought an LG DVD-RW drive (original DVD Rom/ CD-RW was also fried). Then I figured that I should replace the archaic 128 MB PCIe video card with something a little more recent. So I bought a BFG nvidea based 512 MB 8400GS graphics card PCIe. Nothing major, but definately a step up.

I also want to upgrade the 512 MB DDR dual channel system memory to 2-4 gigs. I have since learned that DDR sticks are at least twice as expensive as the newer DDR2 or DDR3.

Sooooooo....I am now thinkinking about a mew motherboard and cpu. This would solve the SATA II issue and allow me to get more RAM for less cash. I'd probably upgrade the power supply and fan too.

But hey.....I still have the original case. Which I like.

I'm probably spending more than a new computer with Vista and a free upgrade to 7, but who wants to do things the easy way?

Thanks for your help,

Joe

Edited August 21, 2009 by irregularjoe

[jcl]

So are the claims of 3Gb/sec on these drives THAT over rated? Clearly that is what they are stating. If you are correct that would be a huge lie.

Not exactly. "SATA 3Gb/s" is one of the official names of the second generation SATA specification and SATA-IO -- the organization responsible for SATA -- recommends (or requires?) that products that implement the spec use that name. It isn't supposed to imply that the devices are capable of 3 Gbit/s transfers. I'm not sure the if even the SATA interfaces on the devices have to be capable of 3 Gbit/s. (In fact, even if you had a drive that was capable of reading or writing 3 Gbit/s, you couldn't do it on SATA 3Gb/s because of the overhead of the SATA protocols.)