Monday, February 6, 2012

SATA 2 vs SATA 3

SATA is a standard used to connect devices like hard drives, solid state drives, DVD drives, etc. to the motherboard.

SATA 2 is rated to run at 3 Gigabits per second. SATA 3 doubles that at 6 Gigabits per second. Realistically, SATA 2 can only achieve 300 Megabites per second, whereas SATA 3 can hit 600 Megabites per second.

Hard drives rarely ever reach the 300 MB/s limit of SATA 2 do to the limitations of their spinning platters. However, solid state drives have no moving parts and have reached speeds far above 300 MB/s. As SSD's continue to become faster, the need for faster SATA standards will continue to grow.

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