Ben's Bargains Serving Fresh Deals 24/7

What SATA can handle 6Gb/s? I thought they top off at 3?
Also, from WD's website, the drive's max transfer rate is 126MB/s. That's only about 1Gb/s. What's the point of a 6Gb/s interface when the drive can't handle that speed? Am I missing something?

I don't follow the math. $120 initially, $15 rebate.... End price $100?? There's a missing $5 somewhere....

I think you are both correct on both accounts.

The missing $5 is automatically credited to my account.

#1, you're correct that no hard disk drive is going to gain much with the SATA 6.0 Gb/s interface. I can only see them coming close in terms of their burst speed (what with larger and faster cache buffers), but that's not going to matter in practice. I think the only reason for them putting this out is to update their controllers and have another bullet point/feature to market against their competition.

From an engineering standpoint, there's certainly the possibility that they could need the extra bandwidth in the future with increases in platter density, rotational speed, etc. so why not update their controllers now? It may have been trivial for them to do once you factor in the breadth of their product line and potential modularization/collaboration with their solid state group who should certainly be incorporating support for the new standard.

6Gb/s = SATA 3.0
The drive's cache memory will use the bandwidth, but the real benefit is marginal.

#1 - New motherboard such as the Asus P7P55D-E Pro have built-in SATA 3.0 controllers which are capable of 6Gb/s. The problem is that there are no physical hard drives that can reach these speeds.

So, with the P755D-E Pro and this drive, you will get 6Gb/s in 64MB increments... LOL!

It's like putting a 200mph speedometer in a Honda Civic. Some day, maybe on a vertical drop, the car might reach that speed.

Now if you put that in a Toyota... that's a different story.

My Toyota can uncontrollably accelerate faster then your Toyota #8!

And... the new Samsung 500Gb and 1TB drives with 500Gb platters are the fastest drives available right now and are cheaper so why buy this?

#8, it's more like having a multispeed transmission in your Honda Civic. Yeah you can get to max speed with either one gear or five but which would you rather have?

You're point is valid tho. Like I said above.. the SATA 3 speed isn't going to do much for you. It'll make happy the geeks that want to pay for bigger numbers.

#11, not sure that's the same thing. Last I check, having a 6Gb/s interface doesn't multiply the drive speed like gears do with car speed.

Since 3Gb/s wasn't the bottleneck, not sure why address it and not the drive speed itself.

Agree with #12

I think if you put multiple drives in an enclosure that uses some kind of bridge to channel all the data through a single eSATA cable, you'll want all the drives to support 6 Gb/sec connections. I'm just guessing, but it would make sense if the drives were limited to 3 Gb/sec, the bridge chip would cap it out at 3 Gb/sec. So for a single hard drive, yeah, SATA 3.0 is worthless.

It's more for the bridging scenario I described above and for SSD headroom. (but mostly for SSD headroom)

Did you say Max Headroom?!?

this isn't even a good deal. Didn't we see 1TB's for around $80 recently? the new sata is 100% useless for non SSD's, and that has been tested by plenty of tech sites.