Sata iii?

[chief@xrs.net]

Can anyone tell me an environment where the benefits of sata iii or usb3 would actually be useful?

As far i can see my corsair c300 is more than fast enough t sata 2

im contemplating upgrading to the amd a8...

[jim]

SATA3 isn't particularly relevant - as you pointed out, SATA2 is pretty fast already.

If you were transferring 1TB of files, then you would probably appreciate the difference, but if you were doing that you'd have a standard rotating drive, and that wouldn't be able to reach SATA2 speeds anyway.

USB3 on the other hand is pretty important, depending on how you use it. Obviously it's not going to affect your keyboard... although I'm sure someone will bring out a USB3 keyboard in time and claim it lets you "pwn noobs at 3.2 Gbit/s".

If you're using USB2 backup drives, then it does make a difference. 480Mb/s is equivalent to about 60 megabytes per second, and after overheads etc it doesn't achieve that. Even rotational external drives can saturate that, and with SSD/flash drives there could be even more capacity that isn't being utilised.

[boxerusman]

it is actually quite useful if you have a lot of data in multiple locations, i.e. if you have 2 or more harddrives, internal/external the speed of this connection will help you move data from one disk to another.

its only handy in data transfer, not computer startups etc..

[jim]

it is actually quite useful if you have a lot of data in multiple locations, i.e. if you have 2 or more harddrives, internal/external the speed of this connection will help you move data from one disk to another.

its only handy in data transfer, not computer startups etc..

So what kind of hard drives would these be?

[boxerusman]

internal drives- get a SATA III disk drive, prefer 7200rpm 32mb cache or above. two hard drives like this would give you optimum transfer speed.
also if you have a lot of cash to spare, ultimately go for a SATA III SSD, that is the mother of all drives. you can get a drive that has 550mb/s both read and write. SSD also benefits you from superfast boot and program launching, the kind of speed is amazing.

external - get a drive that has a usb 3.0 port on it, with a sata III disk inside it.


but make sure motherboard supports both usb 3.0 and sata III, otherwise its pointless. however sata II SSD are still pretty fast.

[jim]

internal drives- get a SATA III disk drive, prefer 7200rpm 32mb cache or above. two hard drives like this would give you optimum transfer speed.

No they won't.

Even a Velociraptor can't take advantage of SATA III.

[Pob255]

They'd not go any faster than the same two hard drives on sataII
Hard drives Cannot saturate the sataII 3Gbit/s bandwidth.

USB2 vs USB3 is a major change from 480 Mbit/s to 4.8 Gbit/s or ten times faster, no only can current hard drives saturate 480 Mbit/s but also there's a power issue, usb2 was limited to 500mA which is not enough for most high speed hard drives, where as usb3 is a max of 900mA
But this only really effects portable hard drives and some memory sticks.