mixing sata drives on same system; outcome?

plisken · 12-04-2012, 06:26 AM

I'm planning on putting together a new system, however have noticed one of the drives is a sata 3 drive, the others being sata 6.

My questions is will all drives perform at the reduced throughput of the slowest drive, ie the sata 3 one?

Thanks in advance...

TobiSGD · 12-04-2012, 07:15 AM

Every disk will work at the maximum speed the disk itself and the controller allows. Of course you have to connect the SATA 3 devices to SATA 3 ports on the mainboard to get full speed, the SATA 2 disks can be used on SATA 2 and SATA 3 ports.

Explanation about the names:
Currently there are three SATA standards:
- SATA 1, maximum speed 1.5 GBit/s
- SATA 2, maximum speed 3 GBit/s
- SATA 3, maximum speed 6 GBit/s, therefore also known as SATA 6GB or variations of it.
There is no standard named SATA 6.

masterclassic · 12-04-2012, 11:05 AM

I'm not sure but it is possible that configuring a SATA 2 hard drive as IDE in the BIOS setup forces it to work at 1.5 GBit/s instead of 3 GBit/s. This IDE configuration was a factory default for many motherboards.
So, check this point for your motherboard.

TobiSGD · 12-04-2012, 11:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by masterclassic

I'm not sure but it is possible that configuring a SATA 2 hard drive as IDE in the BIOS setup forces it to work at 1.5 GBit/s instead of 3 GBit/s. This IDE configuration was a factory default for many motherboards.
So, check this point for your motherboard.

If you are in the BIOS/UEFI already make also sure that you have AHCI enabled.

masterclassic · 12-04-2012, 11:51 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by TobiSGD

If you are in the BIOS/UEFI already make also sure that you have AHCI enabled.

Of course, if there is such a separate setting.
In my motherboard setup (Asus), there are 3 settings: IDE compatibility, SATA/AHCI and SATA/RAID (this last implies AHCI too).

plisken · 12-05-2012, 03:24 AM

Was meaning 3Gb/s and 6 Gb/s, sorry...

ok, so deal is I have 2 recent sata III drives and an older but new sata II drive which I wish to use in this new build.

I was just curious as to whether the sata III drives would perform at 6Gb/s leaving the sata II drive to perform at 3 Gb/s or whether the sata III drives would be forced to run at the slowest speed of all the drives, in this case being the sata II at 3Gb/s

thanks for comments

TobiSGD · 12-05-2012, 07:50 AM

Keep in mind that if those drives are mechanical drives you will see no performance differences between SATA 2 and SATA 3, only modern SSDs can use the enormous bandwidth offered by SATA 3.

cascade9 · 12-09-2012, 05:52 AM

Running different speed devices on the same controller/channel wont affect the speeds even with much older systems (from about late pentium 1/MMX onward).