Sata 600mbs VS 300mbs

Just noticed that Fry's now has 2TB Sata drives at 600mbs versus the normal 300mbs. To get the most out of the newer drives, do you have to use a motherboard that specifically support Sata 600mbs, or is any board that does SATA going to work? My motherboard is an Asus Maximus FormulaII about 1.2 years old and was wondering if it can take advantage of a 600mbs drive.

bsmotril wrote in post #10180939
Just noticed that Fry's now has 2TB Sata drives at 600mbs versus the normal 300mbs. To get the most out of the newer drives, do you have to use a motherboard that specifically support Sata 600mbs, or is any board that does SATA going to work? My motherboard is an Asus Maximus FormulaII about 1.2 years old and was wondering if it can take advantage of a 600mbs drive.

No point. Even most SSD drives don't saturate a sata-300 port, spinning disks won't be able to magically surpass them.

Since the best disc drives only move near 100mbs I don't see the point. Even a good SSD is 250. I do hope this means there are new SSD's which will surpass 300 coming out.

basroil wrote in post #10181006
No point. Even most SSD drives don't saturate a sata-300 port

Current SSDs do have their sequential read speeds choked at 250 MB/s by the sata interface - Wiki Linki. According to that link, some drives could be nudging twice that speed with SATA 3.0. And HDDs will show some benefit as data stored in their cache will be read a lot faster.

Thanks All! So there is a new SATA spec, 3.0, specifically for the higher speed drives then. The Seagate Baracuda's do have a buffer twice as big as the 300mbs drives, so there should be some benefit with large file or sequential reads where you benefit from the big buffer if your mboard is SATA 3.0. That is my interpretation of this so far.