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I purchased a Baraccuda hard-drive (model ST3000DM001) that supports a maximum read transfer rate of 210 MB/s and SATA 1.5/3/6 Gb/s. My motherboard has a limited number of 6 Gb/s ports so I'd like to reserve them for when it's really necessary.

When does a hard-drive benefit from a SATA 6 Gb/s port? Doesn't it require a transfer speed of at least 375 MB/s to surpass the limit of SATA 3 Gb/s? Are there any other benefits of SATA 6 Gb/s vs 3 Gb/s ports?

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A hard drive benefits from being connected to a 6Gbps SATA port when the drive is capable of sustained transfers faster than a 3Gbps SATA port support.

As you've surmised the ST3000DM001 drive can't saturate a 3Gbps port based on its sustained read figure (210MB/sec => ~ 1.7Gbps) so any benefit you would get would be limited to burst transfers out of the cache -- I would connect it to a 3Gbps port.


Spinning disk has a hard time getting up to 6Gbps speeds - In practice as of April 2012 only a few high-end 15K SAS drives can come close to 6Gbps performance (e.g. the IBM 44W2244 clocking in at 4.7Gbps), and the only drives that can saturate 6Gbps SAS or SATA connections are solid-state disks.

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    This is due to shady marketing practices used by spinning rust hard drive manufacturers, sata "6 Gbps" ratings are "burst" ratings, this only lasts for a few milliseconds, then it is up to the hard drive platters (rotational speed and platter density) to sustain any increased transfer rates due to the quality and design of the hard drive. They had to do something to continue to sell consumer grade hard drives based on performance increase over the last Sata spec that was adopted. In the end consumers are misled and uninformed.
    – Moab
    Aug 28, 2012 at 16:10
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    @Moab All HD performance figures are a crock. In this case the drive has a 6Gbps controller, and is capable of 6Gbps transfers out of its (64MB) cache, so for the 0.1sec it takes to flush the cache you might see 6Gbps on the wire. Fortunately manufacturers are usually good about providing maximum sustained transfer rates so you can do the math yourself, but remember even those are a work of fiction: they're based on optimized sequential reads.
    – voretaq7
    Aug 28, 2012 at 16:24
  • at voretag7, i was trying to be nice about it, thanks for saying what I wanted to say.
    – Moab
    Aug 28, 2012 at 20:00
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    This answer confuses two separate and sequential data transfers (R/W head to controller, then controller to host via SATA) as if they were simultaneous and/or co-dependent. If you took a trip that had two stages: Stage 1 was a plane trip by either prop plane or jet plane. Stage 2 was from airport to hotel either by slow bus or fast car. The above answer stipulates that if you use a slow plane, then you should also travel by the slow bus, and not waste time and/or money on the faster car. Illogical! A faster interface is simply better, even if it can't be "saturated".
    – sawdust
    May 7, 2018 at 0:45
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There are some advantages to a faster bus, even if a single spinning drive can't sustain that bandwith:

  1. faster drives. Both higher-density magnetic drives, high-end SSDs and hopefully memristor-based drives can perform at high enough bandwidths as to make the faster bus a need.

  2. big caches. some manufacturers slap a flash device on the drive, to act as a transparent write-through cache, this can be much bigger than the usual RAM cache, so the drive can sustain faster speeds a little longer.

  3. drive arrays. Not too common with SATA connections, but there are some external eSATA enclosures, or maybe...

  4. ...not SATA but SAS. Since SAS and SATA share the same electrical and low-level specifications, improvements on one are quickly transferred to the other technology. Not only SAS drives are available on higher RPMs, but it's also very common to use SAS as a multi-device bus, which leads to the next...

  5. ...SATA multipliers/switches. Increasingly common, these devices allow you to use a big number of drives and external boxes on a small number of channels. It's almost as SAS!

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  • +1 -- If you're chaining drives in any form the higher bandwidth port (matched to lower-bandwidth drives) will help you maximize throughput without tying up more ports.
    – voretaq7
    Aug 29, 2012 at 16:03
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The difference between these would be minimal because a hard disk's transfer rate is lower than 3GB/s.

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Depending how you use your computer, you may cause tiny amounts of data to be transferred to or from the drive (actually the cache attached to the drive) many, many times per second, so if you are doing some task that does thousands of tiny transactions with the drive per second you will save fractions of a second many times per second. Over the course of a working day this may add up, leaving a minute early and not missing your bus, potentially saving you 15 minutes to the next bus.

So a faster controller is better even though the physical spinning disk may not be faster than in an older drive.

In this case connect the device with the most disk transactions per second to the faster controller. Connect the drive with the sustained (large file) transfers to the slower controller.

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I just formatted my SSD, install the new Windows and try to answer this question after I known my mainboard support SATA 6gb/s. Here is the difference of SATA 6Gb/s (above) and SATA 3Gb/s (below) on Samsung Evo 850.

Samsung Magician

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