SATA 3 to SATA 6

Retire

My computer has an ASUS P5N-E SLI motherboard and I was given a bigger hard drive for my computer and have installed it and everything works OK.

It is a Western Digital 2TB SATA 6Gbps Power Saving Internal Hard Drive OEM - Caviar Green

I was wondering if I would get any improved performance or speed if I were to install a

SATA III 6Gbps Controller Card such as this:

http://www.misco.co.uk/productinfo/productinfo?productCode=162840&affiliate=2459&cm_mmc=CSE-_-google-_-Components-_-162840&CAWELAID=666874303

as my motherboard only supports SATA 3Gbps?

fwor

It's almost impossible to know without trying it, as you've no way of knowing wether a PCI-e based card is going to hit a bottleneck elsewhere in the mobo's chipset.

For 20-odd quid I'd probably give it a try...

gonzo127

none what so ever, a hard drive, especially a mechanical one, can only read the information at a certain maximum speed, which is less than the current lower sata speed of 3Gbps, from what i can see the caviar green has a maximum read speed of 100MB/s which is roughly 1Gbps, the SATA III is designed ready for the increased speed of SSD's as they move forward further

fwor

gonzo127 wrote: »

from what i can see the caviar green has a maximum read speed of 100MB/s which is roughly 1Gbps

Good point.

Theoretically you ~might~ see small gains here and there, because most modern drive controllers have "read ahead" optimisers which can read data off disk that hasn't yet been requested, so if the controller has "guessed" right, you would be pulling that out of the drive's cache memory at much higher speed than it can take it off disk.

But from what you say, I probably wouldn't spend 20-odd quid on it.