My external hard drives are SATA III, but they connect via a SATA II controller card, to my SATA II motherboard. I'm wondering if the hard drives would perform much better if they were connected via a SATA III controller card to the same SATA II motherboard? A card such as this one"
http://www.cwol.com/serial-ata/esata...es3pcie212.htm
I have an ASUS U3S6 that my C300 ran off (past tense because flashing the BIOS made it un-bootable) Read speeds were def higher on the card but I gotta say, overall, I can't tell any difference now I'm running it off a SATA 2 port.
EDIT: I posted some benches here (SATA 2) Show us your SSD performance
I can understand that the perceived performance might not match the benchmarked one, but those screenshots only show your SATA II performance...do you have any idea of what the increase with SATA III was percentage-wise?
Of course, your's is based on a SSD, while mine is only a SATA III hard drive, so I would not expect as high of performance as you got, but it sounds as though what improvement I did get would be worth the price of a new controller card (actually two, since I need one for each computer). Thanks.
Seekermeister...it's highly unlikely that your standard hard drives are going to even come close to the SATA II max specs... Unless you have an SSD as an external, I don't think you are going to benefit from swithing form a SATA II interface to a SATA III interface.
By *standard hard drive", are you including SATA III drives also? Somewhere I read that a SATA III drive wouldn't offer much improvement over SATA II unless it also had a 64MB cache, which mine do.
While I understand that a SATA III drive will not use all of the bandwidth available on SATA III, and probably neither on SATA II, I would hope that there would be some improvement, otherwise labeling a hard drive as being SATA III would be nothing more than a hoax. As things are, I'm only getting the performance shown in the first screenshot. The second screenshot is on a similar drive which is only SATA II with a 32MB cache. Hard to tell the difference, isn't it? I would think that with a new controller, that it would bench better than that:
No that is my point. Sata 3.0 can do nearly 300 megabytes per second. No standard mechanical drive can move data that fast. You can speed up the interface all you want, but the data isn't coming off the hard drive any faster physically.
If does seem like false advertising. But people will buy and upgrade often without thinking it through.
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