6G...what's the use?

[bwanaaa]

Many hard drives are advertised with the 6G bandwidth SATA3 feature. But how does that help when the max transfer rate of an HD is 125-150 mB/s - short even for the 3G limit of 250, let alone the practical 500 mB/s limit of 6G.

 

[nanaki333]

sata3 is the new standard, it would be costly to keep making both techs for manufacturers. plus it's marketing. kind of like how you see those $40 video cards with 2GB of memory. people see that and think it's going to be great cause it's a bigger number!

http://www.neweggbusiness.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9B-14-131-498

 

[BrightCandle]

Hard drives have caches on them, all be it quite small. For short periods they can sustain transfer speeds in excess of the 150MB/s you see most of the time in benchmarks.

 

[Torn Mind]

SATA 6.0 Gbps(aka SATA III) is also more convenient than SATA 3.0 Gbps(SATA II) because you don't need jumpers for the hard drive with the SATA 6.0 Gbps to work with SATA 1.5 Gbps.

 

[Auric]

SATA 6.0 Gbps(aka SATA III) is also more convenient than SATA 3.0 Gbps(SATA II) because you don't need jumpers for the hard drive with the SATA 6.0 Gbps to work with SATA 1.5 Gbps.

Jumpers were provided during the transition from 1.5 to 3G to ensure compatibility with non-compliant controllers (i.e. the standard calls for forward compatibilty). Such would still fail to negotiate with 6G drives without limiting the drive to 1.5G via jumper (or firmware tool on a compliant controller, first). So 6G drives do not have them since not cost effective for a practically non-existent issue.