SATA150 versus SATA300 for gaming

[blackrain]

Is there any real world difference in performance between sata150 and sata300? I have an old sata150 drive that has a lot more space than my seagate barracuda 7200.9. However, I am looking for a fast drive for windows xp gaming. Not sure if the seagate 7200.9 is the better choice because of sata300. I am just worried that I am going to run out of room. I guess I can try HDTune or other HD benchmarking tool and see how the difference comes out. Just curious as to what general experience will tell me.

 

[razel]

No. The drive you mentioned probably isn't fast enough to be held back by SATA 150. In fact, even if you go with a 2010 model HDD your sequential read/writes might just hit SATA 150 limit. The only advantage to SATA 300 is if the 7200.9 uses NCQ and your current SATA 150 controller doesn't support. Then in certain benches you'll see a performance difference.

 

[blackrain]

And here are the benchmark results. Not sure that I see a big difference...what do you think? Looks like the burst rate is the biggest difference...what is the significance of that?

 

[razel]

Ignore burst rate... It's a good way to confirm if the interface is running at 150/300 speed. The benches look like they are from different drives... Seagate 160 vs. Maxtor 200. Either way, they'll probably perform the same.

 

[ASTOCADDIDS]

on new egg, western digital has a sata2 250gb hd for a 110 dollars. thats what i bough and it is frigging fast. greatly improved gaming performance and regular application speed.

 

[CurseTheSky]

You want speed, you're running out of room, and you're worried about the SATA interface...

Sounds like it's time for a new hard drive!

I highly suggest picking up a Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB, or a Western Digital 640GB Black. There are plenty of other good drives around as well, but those two in particular tend to be very good in the cost vs. performance vs. size ratio. They should run around $60-75 or so.