HDD caddy sata to sata. Does it support Sata III by default?

Hello there,

I was searching quite a lot, but I could not find any answer. I would like to ask:

I've checked a lot of caddies (to replace dvd rom with second HDD/SSD). However most of them do not write whether they support Sata III. Or does that mean that they support it by default?

So, should I look for those which indicates sata 3 connection or it does not matter as it is always the case?

Cheers,

Justin

 

The caddy really is only for fitting the hard drive securely in the optical bay. It does not have any bearing on the SATA speed - that is dependent on the drive and connection, and optical drive bays typically only support SATA II.

 

The caddy's mini/slim-SATA connector to SATA connector is just acting as a bridge. Like Prostar already said, it does not have any bearing on the SATA speed rather the drive and connection. Most optical bays are SATAII, very few are SATAIII (similar to mSATA drives and connections).

I took this of my own caddy, see:



EDIT: On a related note, check out this adapter:

 

Howdy Justin.

SATA speeds depend on the chipset/SATA controller your system has, not the HDD caddy or the SATA adapter that it uses. It also depends on if the hard drive or SSD is capable of SATA III speeds. In reality, no hard drive on the market today will make SATA III speeds, so don't be fooled by thinking you need a hard drive, caddy, or adapter that is "SATA III certified". Only an SSD can reach SATA III speeds currently. But also realize this: usually notebooks will only have SATA III on the primary drive SATA port. Any secondary drive SATA ports or the optical drive SATA port will be SATA II. The exception is with higher end systems like Clevo's and such which hold two hard drives and both SATA ports are specified to be SATA III. I have yet to see the optical drive's SATA port be anything other that SATA II, seeing as optical drives can't even make SATA II speeds anyway.

In short, buy whatever caddy you want. They as long as the connectors match up you don't need to worry about any loss of speed.

 

Thanks for replies guys. The thing is that I would like to use ssd disk in that caddy (Vertex 4, SATA III). How may I check does my laptop support Sata III in DVD rom bay? The primary bay for HDD/SSD is supported by Sata III, however I do not know about DVD bay.

Laptop is HP Pavilion dv6 6b18sg (Intel HM65 Chipset).

Thanks,
Justin

 

10 to 1 it doesn't. The DVD bay's SATA connector is almost always SATA II.

 

Hopefully you realize that SATA is backwards compatible. You can use a SATA 3 drive on SATA 1.

Nothing is stopping you from doing what you want to do. But its always a good thing to check.

 

Depends.

The trend is newer mobo's in bigger laptops with DVD bay, sometimes (often?) have DVD bay w/SATA III capability.

e.g. I'm pretty sure my new Lenovo Thinkpad T530 has DVD bay w/SATA III capability.

 

Yeah, I was going to say, how many brand new laptops have you guys actually tested to see if the optical drive is on SATA 3? Isn't it native to the sandy bridge chipset? I don't see why most new laptops would not have the optical drive on sata 3.

 

My thoughts exactly. I am guessing, maybe it is cheaper to produce with Sata II? I don't know

 

This explains a lot

List of Intel chipsets - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

But its still hard to determine if most new laptops use sata 3 on the optical drive.

Actually... I think we can definitely say that if you already have 2 sata 3 ports, your optical drive isn't going to be on sata 3.

Also... did it occur to anyone that HWinfo would probably be the easiest way to answer this question?

 

Yeah, according to Wiki, you are right! But which device could use 2nd sata III port? (1st one is for HDD bay).

Attaching screenshots of PC Wizard 2012:

 

The only way I've found to tell if the ODD SATA port is SATA II or III is to plug a SATA III device into the port and see if it runs at SATA II or III.

 

If you want a definitive answer on the SATA version on the optical bay connection, I would get in touch with someone from HP, or find a detailed spec sheet on the motherboard for that model of laptop (that is if HWinfo can't spell it out for us). I have to go with radji on this one though; I suspect it's SATA II. But of course, it doesn't hurt to dig deeper!

 

To make it easier: It doesn't matter.

If you're putting a mechanical HDD in there, then the transfer speeds won't be high enough to saturate SATA2. So the extra potential bandwidth of SATA3 is irrelevant.

If you're putting an SSD in there, you're obviously looking at it for performance boost purposes. But an SSD's performance boost in real-world performance comes from its superior Random Read Speeds (typically maxes out at 50MBps - 75Mbps, literally 100x faster than a mechanical HDD), which does not saturate even an SATA2 connection. Random Read Speeds account for around 95% of the data access patterns on a drive used for OS / apps / games.

The only time when SATA2/3 matters is if:

• You're using a SATA3 capable SSD
• You're doing large sequential file read/writes from that drive (e.g. video editing, benchmarks, or flat file copies).

SATA3 actually matters a lot less than you think, because it only has marginal benefits to SATA2 in only marginal situations.

 

the answer is simple..
I just does not need to be SATA III for optical drive ..
disc is so slow that even sata II is too much.. for it..