SATA3 splitter

August 27, 2012 3:22 PM

SATA3 Channel Splitter or Convert SATA2 Channel to SATA3?

My new Acer Predator computer has 6 SATA connections on the motherboard, of which 5 are SATA2 and only number 0 is the faster SATA3. I got an extra 4TB hard drive which is also SATA3. It works in a SATA2 channel, but only at SATA2 speed.

Is there a splitter for the SATA3 channel, or a way to convert one of the SATA2s?

Alternatively, will the setup database get confused if I move everything on drive 0 to the new drive, switch the new one to the SATA3 channel and make it the boot drive?

posted by KRS to computers & internet (2 answers total)

SATA II bandwidth (approximately 300MB/sec) should be plenty for your 4TB drive, which likely has a sustained transfer rate around 150MB/sec or so. I wouldn't worry about it too much.
posted by helicomatic at 3:43 PM on August 27, 2012

Wildly unlikely. SATA, unlike PATA, is a point-to-point bus (meaning one controller port goes to one device). There are such things as port multipliers, but the controller has to support it, which most consumer-grade controllers dont.

More importantly, why? Your 4TB hard drive has a maximum sustained transfer rate well under 2Gbps, whereas the SATA2 bus is 3Gbps. Conceivably, you might limit the speed of reads from the drive's buffer, but the effect of that would be so infinitesimal as to be nonexistent.

Bottom line -- you can cause yourself endless grief trying to find a way to "split" the SATA3 port, but you will see absolutely no performance difference whatsoever with your SATA3 hard drive plugged into a SATA2 port. The only device that's going to benefit from a 6Gb/s SATA3 connection is a particularly fast SSD, which you don't mention here.

(Note: you don't say which 4TB drive you have, but taking the Hitachi Deskstar 7K4000 as a representative example, it's got a claimed max sustained transfer speed of 204MB/s. 8 x 204 = 1.632 Gbps, barely half the bandwidth of a SATA2 connection.)
posted by McCoy Pauley at 3:47 PM on August 27, 2012 [3 favorites]