Hi guys, I am planning a new build, and have already decided on the motherboard, which happens to be sata 3 (6gb/s) compatible. Now, I have been offered a cheap 1 TB drive new from a friend, only it runs at sata 2 speed (3gb/s). I have a limited budget, so the choice is between the larger 1TB drive at 3gb/s, or spend a little more and get around 500gb using sata 2. So, any thoughts? Do applications normally saturate the sata 2 speed anyway? Will having a "faster" HDD actually translate to a performance improvement? I figure it's best to go with the larger drive, and then later on get an SSD for a boot drive when they drop in price. Cheers, Sam
do you mean SATA3 aka 6Gb/s im guessing so. mechanical HDDs do not benefit from this at all as they dont even saturate SATA2 (3Gb/s) Best mechanical drive is a samsung 1TB F3 if you can get that a samsung F3 500GB is like 95% as fast. beware not all HDD are the same so a cheap 1TB HDD may in fact be an old one and be slow.
Mechanical drives don't saturate SATA 2. The only drives that take advantage of 6Gbps are some of the faster SSDs. You are definitely better off with the larger drive ... then move to an SSD boot drive when you can.
Awesome, I will get the 1TB, sata 2 drive then. @adam_bagpuss: Funny you should say that about the samsung drives, as the one I've been offered is here because it's on a deal on scan if you buy two.
That's the good one alright ... I have one on the way. It's pretty much the best mechanical drive you can buy right now.
Well, unless you're including (most) 15K enterprise drives (well my Seagate Cheetah 15K.7 SAS drives are significantly faster on most r/w benchmarks & irl than the F3s) or, since sequential r/w isn't the be all & end all of how fast a drive is, you ignore random access times & iops where the Velociraptors tend to win out. Having said that, the F3s are decent drives for the money (& own 4 few myself).
