I noticed today that my 2.5 SATA 160gb hard drive has 2 options on the back, One is 1.5gb/s operation and the other is 3.0gb/s operation, i looked around and found that 3.0gb/s is way better with no performance loss, Question is could i set it to 3.0gb/s as its on 1.5gb/s now? Thanks in advanced
doesn't matter worth a damn. Fastest burst rates on single drives are around 150mb/s and sustained is around 40-70mb/s on most drives. long story short, it doesn't matter when you use harddrives. unless you're using a RAM drive it could matter less. RAM drives usually go onto SAS interfaces though, not SATA. you will acheive a benefit of 0, zip, nada in 99.9% of applications. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA
Even if you enable it to be 3.0 Gb/s, unless your motherboard supports SATA-II, it will still function at 1.5 Gb/s. Assuming mobo support, if your drive is a Seagate then IIRC, you only need to set the jumper to the correct position. If you are using a Hitachi T7k250, then you will need to use ftools (download from the Hitachi GST site) to enable the SATA-II mode. By default it is on SATA-I. I don't know about the other brands. I have always used both my drives on 3.0 Gb/s since I installed them, so I really don't know if switching to 1.5 Gb/s slows down the performance. Here is an HDtach quickbench screenshot for my Seagate 7200.10 w/16MB cache. Burst speed = 259 MB/s Average = 65.5 MB/s The Hitachi is a bit slower.
looks like you have a nice drive... hey, I have the same drive... heh regardless it's usually ownly at burst speed for a fraction of a second, sustained speeds are far more important than burst.
