Serial ATA Hard Drive Bay Adapter - bottleneck?

I am thinking about getting a ThinkPad Serial ATA Hard Drive Bay Adapter for my notebook. Will it allow the SATA hard drive to run at full speed or does it run slower through the adapter. Do these adapters create a bottleneck?

Just wondering if I would still have benefit from a 7200RPM drive over a 5400RPM drive or if even a 5400RPM drive runs as fast as it should through the adapter.

 

An SATA to Parallel ATA adapter will create a bottleneck because an SATA notebook hard drive transfers data at 150 MB/s while a Parallel ATA channel can only hit a theoretical speed of 133 MB/s. However, you shouldn't be able to notice this bottleneck. I would get the adapter because you can use newer hard drives and be ready for the future.

As far as the 5400 vs. 7200 RPM, this doesn't get slowed down by the adapter. This is just the internal rotational speed of the platters which hold the data. The faster the RPM, the less time needed to seek data within the hard drive. 7200s will make your OS generally faster by a lot.

-J.B.

 

It will be like having a car with a top speed of 100mph running at two highways with speed limits of 200mph and 250mph. Will it make a difference to how fast you travel? Guess no.