Hi, I just bought 2 external hard drive enclosures so that I may scale up my DAW backup capacity.

http://www.newegg.com/Pro...x?Item=N82E16817347017



I currently use a pair of external hard drives as backup but I need more capacity.

FWIW, this question has nothing to do with the NAS question I asked earlier this week.

Here's my question; Are SATA III drive backward compatible? The 2 enclosures I bought are Sata II capable. I could use a pair of Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200rpm drives that are SATA II and get started but the newer 2TB 7200rpm drives that are SATA III seem priced so competitively ($10 more for the extra TB) that I'd love to use them.

These are just for backup so I guess I could settle for a SATA II 5400rpm 2TB drive, but they actually cost more than the latest vIII versions.

I know that it is unlikely that a SATA III drive will ever hit it's throughput capability in a real system... it's my impression that a SATA II drive runs the same way once it faces bottlenecks in the system.

I also know that I can't expect my older DAW to see 2TB, but I plan on getting a new DAW in the next month or two.

I am hoping I can get the 2TBs now, partition them with my Win 7 64bit laptop and then have a useful backup packae for the next year or so.




Can anyone give me some advice about the SATA compatibility?


Thanks very much.

best regards,
mike



edit to add links and photo

I just built a new PC and have a SATA III SSD.  But, only SATA II drives and they will work with a SATA III port (at SATA II speed).

From what I saw, a SATA III drive will work on a SATA II port (at the SATA II speed).

"mike_mccue"
Are SATA III drive backward compatible?

I have 2 600GBs Maxtor Velociraptor @ 10k rpm - 32MB Cache (SATA 3 - 6Gbps) which are connected to SATA 2 ports, and after a year of heavy use, I don't think I ever came close to saturating the available bandwidth. But to answer your question, yes they are. So it would make sense to go for the SATA 3 drives especially if the price is right. As always IMHO. 

Thank You!

I have a Sata III drive on my Sata II bus since build time no problems.

Actually the sustained transfer rate is identical whatever bus I put it on.  I guess as it was an early Sata III drive I'm thinking the only part that's actually different on the drive is the interface itself.

Thanks for the info.

As it turns out I found an attractive price on a pair of retail box Seagate Barracuda SATA II 2TB 7200rpm drives. The retail box warranty seemed valuable, to me, and the comparably priced SATA III alternatives were bare drive packages with vague, if any, warranty considerations.

The Seagate warranty is valuable, I've had really good service from them over the years.

As it turns out I found an attractive price on a pair of retail box Seagate Barracuda SATA II 2TB 7200rpm drives. The retail box warranty seemed valuable, to me, and the comparably priced SATA III alternatives were bare drive packages with vague, if any, warranty considerations.

No conventional HD is close to saturating the SATA-II bus.
IOW, You can connect a conventional SATA-III HD to a SATA-II controller... and achieve the same exact speed.


Obviously the SATA-III bus has more bandwidth... but that doesn't make things faster (unless you've reached the point of saturation).