SSD cable specification speed.. 2 or 3

Duderooni

Duderooni

Duderooni

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So given the amount of awesome SSD deals this week, I took the plunge with a M4 Crucial. I have a couple of queries, the main one being does it matter which kind of 'SATA cable' I use? I mean, do I need a SATA 3 spec cable? I bought these cables not really thinking about it - Link here, will these yield SATA 3 speeds or have I messed up?

Also, I plan on updating the firmware straight away, should I format the drive first? Or just literally plug it in, boot using the FW updater, then install windows 7? I understand I need to set it to AHCI, anything else I need to be aware of.. Like should it be SLOT 0 - MASTER, etc? Any input would be greatly appreciated!
 
You may find it already has the newest firmware, but if not I don't think it makes any difference whether you format it first or not.

And it doesn't matter where you plug it in, just in SATA 3 for the best speeds of course, and I think any SATA cable is generic and should do SATA 2 or 3, but you can get a for-sure answer by just downloading AS-SSD or some other benchmark, and as long as you get speeds above 300 MB/s then it's definitely running on 3
 
I *think* the cables do matter but I'm not 100% sure. My motherboard came with four cables, two were for 6Gbps and two were for 3Gbps. It would seem strange they would label the cables and make them different colours if they operated the same way since physically they looked identical.
 
According to Wikipedia, there's no such thing as a SATA 6Gb/s cable. The cables are identical for both standards.

Crucial's firmware updater doesn't care whether your drive is formatted or not. I flashed mine straight out of the box.
 
If a SATA cable drops the speed, its defective and wasn't fit for any SATA implementation as any SATA cable with decent signal integrity will run 6Gbs fine.
 
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