BleepingComputer.com: Is my Sata I hard drive fast enough...

I recently purchased a 640GB Western Digital Black hard drive, i am in the process of rearranging my linux and windows partitions. I currently have windows 7 x64 installed to an 80GB Sata II hard drive w/ an 8 MB cache. I am considering moving it to a 160GB Sata I w. 8MB of cache.

I would like to know if you think i will see a performance hit in windows 7 by moving to a SATA I hard drive...



Also, would it be possible to do Windows 7 and a linux extended partition on the same disk? I know that when you install windows 7, it makes 2 partitions, and i dont want to overwrite my existing linux partition.


Thanks!

If your motherboard supports SATA 2, Definatly.

Going from SATA 2 to SATA 1 is going to slow down any OS .

SATA 2 works much faster.

The only way you wouldn't take a performance hit is if your motherboard only supports SATA 1 .
In that case it wouldn't matter.

fairjoeblue, on Mar 27 2009, 04:52 PM, said:

Well my doubt in any performance hit is because most HDDs won't go any faster than ~100MB/s, and a SATA I drive should max out at 187 MB/s. I dont have NCQ enabled, so the only real difference on my system is the bandwidth on the drive.

EDIT:

i found this white paper from seagate that says that a 1.5GB/s SATA drive that is identical to a 3.0 GB/s drive performs the same regardless of interface.

http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/whitepaper/TP-539.pdf

This post has been edited by Zach Al: 28 March 2009 - 04:31 PM

"Well my doubt in any performance hit is because most HDDs won't go any faster than ~100MB/s, and a SATA I drive should max out at 187 MB/s. I dont have NCQ enabled, so the only real difference on my system is the bandwidth on the drive."

My EXPIERENCE has proven to me that a SATA 2 HD is quite a bit faster the SATA 1

On my own computer I went from a SATA 1 to a SATA 2 hard drive & , trust me, , there is a [very] noticble difference.

It stands to reason going the other way SATA 2 to SATA1 will slow it down.

Well i ended up installing Windows 7 on my WD Caviar Black drive, which is the fastest HDD i own.

Thanks