How do I tell if my computer has SATA II or III?

Hi Shaeferhund,

Yes, your system supports SATA 6Gb/s.

Just an aside, the standards are technically called SATA 1.5, 3 and 6 Gb/s, or revision 1.0, 2.0 or 3.0, respectively.

Thank you Osprey, I appreciate your taking the time to answer.  So I guess I can go ahead and start shopping for a 6 Gb/s SSD now -- and cross my fingers and hope that all goes well with installation etc.

By the way, for future reference, where do I look on my system to find out which SATA it can handle?

Thanks

I just did a search. Sorry, I did not bookmark the page.

I was hoping to get some similar advice as going down the same route or at least planning too with a ssd ,

Ive got a Dell precision T1500 work station ... i beleive its a sata 3Gb/s interface but would like to be sure !!!

I know that it would support a 6Gb/s device but obviously i wont get the best out of it  ... or even if it would be any improvment on the current (original HDD) speeds or even sufficent to make the investment worth while. 

If you are using windows and want detailed information about your hardware, want to do some benchmarking, etc, try SiSoftware Sandra. This tool is free for home use.

If you click storage device - physical disk, it will provide  the type and speed of your sata ports under the transfer mode sections..

Don't know about the T1500 workstation but as a side note, the BIOS may contain options where you can limit the sata port speed (to 1.5gbps or 3gbps or 6gbps?). You may also be able to set the sata port mode to various options like RAID+AHCI, etc, which may or may not have impact port speed.

PC. Specs  2.93Ghz i7 870 64 bit  16 gig ram widows 7  professional

ATi HD 6850 GD I GiG

Current HDD Hitachi HDs721010CLA  1000GB

Planning on putting OS & App's on a 256 SSD  but will i see the benifits ???

(still use the HDD as storage)

Thanks Sklylark for the suggestions much apreciated... i ran the  sisoft sandra .. wow  a little to indepth for my ability i think .. but im now fairly sure ive gota  3gb/s sata port  "sata300"&my Bios has the  AHCI already in use  .. still unsure just how much of a boast the ssd will give the dollars its gona cost though can you advise

pps the sisoft score was 6.91 KP something or other ??? Any good ???

You shouldn't be focusing too much on benchmarks, especially overall benchmarks, instead focus on gaining some basic understanding of computer hardware and software. (You may then realize that 16G of RAM is probably overkill for what most people do - pull out 1/2 the memory and see the difference).

Within the section of SiSoft sandra, you will find and this will provide info on what speed the interface is running at. In my case i am running my SATA interface at SATA600 which according to the sata wiki is @ SATA3 (revision 3) providing 600MB/s (megabytes per second) or 6Gb/s (gigabits per second) peak data throughput.

I'm using $$ SATA3 HDD (10K rotational speed enterprise class drives with 32MB cache) connected to the SATA3 port running at SATA600 speeds which gives me max 111MB/s read, 108MB/s write, 95MB/s combined score according to the benchmarking tool. If i had these HDD connected in a RAID0 setup (via integrated motherboard Raid), it should improve a little but SATA3 SSDs will kill these drives with respect to speed. It is interesting to note that SATA2 (revision 2) @ 300MB/s can be saturated by SSD drives, something my HDD would have trouble doing.

Problem with SSD is that good ones are very very expensive and long term reliability may be an issue unless you spend big dollars on an enterprise class SLC SSD (which come with 5 year warranties). By the time i'll jump to SSD, the best option will be PCIe cards with integrated raid chips and flash memory (as is coming out now at very high prices).

You will notice a good improvement with consumer class SSD's but i'll wait until the tech gets more reliable and cheaper before i go down the flash route as my HDD do what i want OK and i'm not in that much of a hurry.. I like to drink coffee in front of my puter :emotion-1:.

What ever you do, plan of HDD/SSD failures and as such have a good backup routine in place.

Just set up RAID0 via the integrated motherboard RAID controller using my 2x enterprise HDD which are still connected to the SATA3 port running at SATA600 speeds. These drives now give me max 215MB/s read score according using the Sandra benchmarking tool (though the tool has issues doing the write test). This is almost twice the read performance when not in RAID0 and the OS is much snappier as a result.

As you can see, these drives in this configuration would be knocking on the door of SATA2 and likely saturating SATA1 ports. And SSD's would give these drives a run for their money (longevity issues ignored) without having to set up RAID..

had some weird formatting issue above - sorry :emotion-1: