I've had a sata 2 cable connected to a sata 3 port with an SSD hanging off it and it doesn't make a difference - as you'd expect. These guys did a little test
Is Your SATA Cable Slowing Down Your Data Transfers? Max PC Investigates | Maximum PC
Summary: a bad connector is a bad connector and don't exceed the sata cable length standard.
I thought it mattered. Must be a marketing gimmick of a sort. I could have picked one up today had I known this. Oh, well-I'll soon have my "SATA III" cable about Thursday.
"OS at 168 G". That's the occupied space on C? Is that all Windows and applications or is some of it data?
On my PC, I'd guess it would take about 65 minutes to make a Macrium image of C with that much occupied space--about one minute for each 2.5 GB of occupied space. That's for an Intel i5-2500 processor.
A quick format of a drive shouldn't take over a few seconds. Simple drag and drop copying between 2 internal drives should be anywhere from 1 to 5 GB per minute, depending on the speed of the drives.
That's the space occupifed on the Vista machine where I was formatting/copying the digital photos to put on Windows 7. I don't know how much space is occupied on Windows 7 as I have it down at the moment. It has the Intel i7-4790 processor.
Formatting that 500G drive via the Vista took a good five hours. I didn't think it would ever finish.
From what all I've been able to put together on this the cable matters not-only the devices it's connected to as for speed.
However, I just read this...
"Yes, there is a real difference, it's the data transfer speed. SATA 3 has the potential to double the speed of SATA 2. Like malmental posted, the cables can be used interchangably. Here are the possible scenarios you'll encounter:
1. Device and mobo support SATA 2 - use of a SATA 3 cable will not get you the 6GB/s due to physical limitations of device and mobo.
2.Device and mobo support SATA 3 - use of a SATA 2 cable will not get you the 6GB/s due to physical limitation of the cable.
3. Device supports SATA 3, but mobo supports SATA 2 - using either SATA 2 or 3 cable will result in 3GB/s.
4. Device supports SATA 2, but mobo supports SATA 3 - using either cable will result in 3GB/s.
5. Device and mobo support SATA 3 - use of SATA 2 cable will result in 3GB/s
6. Device and mobo support SATA 3 - using a SATA 3 cable will get you the 6GB/s"
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/30...ata-sata-cable
2 & 5 are wrong. AGAIN, SATA II and SATA III cables are the same. The only difference is marketing hype to justify charging more for a cable.
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