How can I tell if it's Sata II or Sata III?

I just bought a new laptop, and I am unsure if it has the capability to use the faster Sata III (6gb/s)?

I know the drive in it is only capable of Sata II, but I need to know about the laptops capability.

It's an MSI A6400-042us. (MSI Notebook Official Website)

CPUz didn't tell me, and HDDTune didn't tell me. (I'd rather not pay for the one that might tell me, HDTune Pro)

Hello Hondajt,

I would say it is safe to assume you don't have compatibility for Sata III as it only states Sata and because we don't use Sata I anymore and it does'nt specifically say its Sata III either.

Hope this helps
Lucky

You could give Sisoft Sandra Lite a try that should tell you (under Mainboard/Diskcontroller).
SiSoftware Zone

Just remember that SATA III is a misnomer. The correct expression would be Sata Revision 3 (or Sata 6GB/sec)
http://www.serialata.org/developers/...guidelines.asp

-DG

The reason I ask is because the new Second Generation Intel mobile chipsets (like my HM65) come with 2x Sata 6gb/s capability, and I would like to hope that manufactures are taking advantage of that......but you never know.

They probably aren't because it costs more.

The manual states for almost everything"The actual equipment may be different. Ask your Dealer
If that's not possible for some reason, get the exact make and model of your harddrive and google that.
Chances are if that's a SATA Rev III then the bus is too... (besides if the chipset is Rev.3 capable as you say why would it be more expensive to utilize that?)

-DG

Keep in mind also, I don't think there are any hard drives that are yet able to saturate a 3Gbps pipe... let alone 6Gbps.

EDIT: Even the fastest SSD's aren't much past the 250 MBps mark (2.0 Gbps). Basically, you won't see a performance difference between SATA 2.0 and SATA 3.0 for a while, unless you're running quad-RAID-0 SSD's

mastacox said:

Keep in mind also, I don't think there are any hard drives that are yet able to saturate a 3Gbps pipe... let alone 6Gbps.

EDIT: Even the fastest SSD's aren't much past the 250 MBps mark (2.0 Gbps). Basically, you won't see a performance difference between SATA 2.0 and SATA 3.0 for a while, unless you're running quad-RAID-0 SSD's

That is not correct. There are SSD drives now that will do circa 500 MB/s. Examples are the OCZ vertex 3 and Intel 510 series SSD.

Also, you have to quote the right numbers. SATA transfer rates are in RAW bits. The SATA protocol does 8b/10b encoding - in other words only 8 data bits per 10 raw bits. This means a 3Gb/s raw link is (8b/10b) * 3000 Mbits/s / (8 bits/byte) = 300 MBytes/s data transfer speed. This makes it easy to translate RAW Mb/s to real data transfer speeds in MB/s for 8b/10b encoded protocols like SATA and PCI-e - you just divide by 10.