Where'd SATA 3.0 go?

jimmyj68

Senior member
Mar 18, 2004
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:confused: Thought my system was operating fine - running an E6600 on the Intel DP965LT board with 2 gig of memory and the EVGA 8800GS vid card (with the exception of crazy problems with Flight Sim X - can't tell for sure if it is the program or my vid card - but that's another thread). Any way, installed the Intel system monitor program and found out my HD though capable of SATA 150 was running at SATA 100. Tweaked and poked and did and undid (?) all kind of stuff but the HD refuses to operate at SATA 150.

I know that were I using a non-SATA II mobo I would use a jumper on the HD to make sure it would operate at SATA 100. No such jumper is installed. What's going on - what did I do wrong?:eek:
 

Zepper

Elite Member
May 1, 2001
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There are SATA and SATA 2 drives. The interface for SATA drives runs at up to 150MB/sec, the interface for SATA 2 runs at up to 300MB/sec. No SATA drive can actually transfer data at those rates except in short bursts.

.bh.
 

jimmyj68

Senior member
Mar 18, 2004
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OK, Sorry folks I went to bed after posting this. So I guess the answer is "not to worry," this is the way SATA boards and drives normally operate.

There is a setting (for the drive(s)) in the bios that warns it only works when a VISTA operating system is installed I believe it is called ACIS or something like that. Don't know what it does but I get a blue screen flash and instant reboot if I use that setting. Do you suppose it runs the SATA at a higher rate?
 

Zepper

Elite Member
May 1, 2001
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four Hitachi 7K160s in RAID-0 can touch 400MB/sec in burst and can easily saturate SATA on avg. transfer rate. Need SATA 2 for best performance... Not bad for about $200.00!

.bh.
 

MerlinRML

Senior member
Sep 9, 2005
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Originally posted by: Zepper
four Hitachi 7K160s in RAID-0 can touch 400MB/sec in burst and can easily saturate SATA on avg. transfer rate. Need SATA 2 for best performance... Not bad for about $200.00!

.bh.

Originally posted by: Blurry
3 raptors on raid 0 can do 150mb/s

While those RAID arrays can reach those speeds, you forget that each drive has a dedicated SATA 150 or SATA 300 connection. With 4 SATA 300 drives you have an aggregated 1200MB/sec and with 3 SATA 150 drives you have an aggregated 450MB/sec of bandwidth available on the SATA connections.

The point being, the SATA interface offers a lot more theoretical bandwidth than any hard drive can possibly use.
 

Mark R

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
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Originally posted by: MerlinRML

While those RAID arrays can reach those speeds, you forget that each drive has a dedicated SATA 150 or SATA 300 connection. With 4 SATA 300 drives you have an aggregated 1200MB/sec and with 3 SATA 150 drives you have an aggregated 450MB/sec of bandwidth available on the SATA connections.

That's not always the case.

If you get external SATA RAID enclosures, it's common for them to run up to 4 drives of 1 SATA port. SATA 1.5 could leave a significant bottleneck on the link between enclosure and controller - hence the importance of SATA 3.0