SATA throughput

[jnojr1]

I just bought a Seagate 750GB disk to add to my system. I opened up the case... and realized, ahh shit, I need a SATA cable! Well, I have odds and ends of old PC stuff here and there, and I found a cable. But... is it 1.5Gb/s? 3.0Gb/s? I don't know!

I thought I'd play it safe, and went around the corner to Best Buy (I know, but Fry's is several miles away, and there are no real computer stores left). They had one cable... for $20. Eff you. And it said it was 150 MB/s

So, I came home and used my old cable. I can see the disk and am formatting it now. But, is there any way for me to find out what speed it's actually connected at, and test the actual throughput? Years ago, I'd use hdparm on Linux servers to really beef up IDE performance. Is there a Windows equivalent that will let me test actual throughput and tweak it?

 

[frostedflakes]

SATA1 cables should run fine at 300MB/s. AFAIK, the only difference between an SATA1 and SATA2 cable is the clip, which was added to the SATA2 spec.

 

[BlueAcolyte]

SATA 1.5gbps divided by 8 (bits per byte) is ~172.5 megabytes per second. Does your Seagate drive do HALF of that? There is no real need to tweak throughput.

 

[Denithor]

Numbers are off but Blue is right in essence.

1.5Gbps = 187.5MB/s

And none of the mechanical drives available today (including the velociraptors) can come anywhere even close to saturating that bandwidth. Not to mention, there's no difference in the cables for 3.0 vs 1.5, it's all in the sockets.

 

[BlueAcolyte]

Doh, thanks Denithor. The more you know!

 

[IntelUser2000]

Numbers are off but Blue is right in essence. 1.5Gbps = 187.5MB/s And none of the mechanical drives available today (including the velociraptors) can come anywhere even close to saturating that bandwidth. Not to mention, there's no difference in the cables for 3.0 vs 1.5, it's all in the sockets.

Guys, you guys are spreading misinformation. 1.5Gbps SATA is 150MB/s. Serial ATA uses 8b10b encoding scheme, it uses 2 bits for something else so it has 10 to 1 conversion.