SATA cable

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14 Nov 2011
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Quick couple of questions for you knowledgeable lot.

I recently picked up a new HDD and a blu-ray drive. I just swapped over my old DVD drive with the blu-ray drive which was easy enough. I had thought I had a spare SATA cable lying around to hook up the extra HDD, but have not managed to find it so will need to pick up a new one.

Checking through the motherboard manual I noticed I have 2x 6Gbps SATA slots and 4x 3Gbps SATA slots. Would using the 3Gbps slot be better suited to my older HDD 1TB, my new 3TB HDD or for the blu-ray drive or would I not notice either way? Would rather not find out I had been badly bottlenecking a component at a later date.

When I go and grab a new SATA cable is there anything I should check for? I am assuming any newer versions are backwards compatible. I was just going to grab the cheapest would this be a bad idea for any reason?

Thanks for the help.
 
Thanks for all the extra replies. I was just after storage, already have a 1TB almost full so the capacity of a new SSD would not be sufficient for me. I do see a lot of advocates for SSDs, but feel it is an optional extra rather than something I require. As you say though, I may end up kicking myself when I do eventually get round to adding one.

I would not mind hearing exactly where I would see this extra performance from having a SSD. My system already feels pretty slick, possibly because for comparison the only other one I use is an older and much lower spec laptop at work.
 
Use the SSD for Windows & basic programs, then set things like..

Documents
Videos
Music
Pictures
(large games)

etc on the hard drive.

With an SSD, everything opens instantly, it's the instant seek time that sets them apart from hard drives. and the blisteringly fast read/write times.

I think with OcUK you get a 14 day money back deal, buy one and you won't want to send it back ;)
 
Use the SSD for Windows & basic programs, then set things like..

Documents
Videos
Music
Pictures
(large games)

etc on the hard drive.

With an SSD, everything opens instantly, it's the instant seek time that sets them apart from hard drives. and the blisteringly fast read/write times.

I think with OcUK you get a 14 day money back deal, buy one and you won't want to send it back ;)
 
SSD is not a luxury its a necessity.

If you bought one as your windows boot drive it would also free up space on your 1tb drive as it wouldnt need the OS on it anymore. Another bonus.

I have my user folders mapped to my H: drive which has a 1tb partition. I have a 240gb SSD as my windows drive and a 512gb SSD as my gaming drive and another 2tb drive split over two partitions.

My PC boots to the desktop in ten seconds. Is that slick enough for you ? :D
 
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