If you’re thinking of buying a new shiny 550MB/s SSD, there are two things you should keep in mind:
- Does your motherboard support SATA 3.0?
- SATA revision 3.0 (also known as SATA 6) is NOT SATA 3
(Some motherboards specs even refer to Sata-600 and Sata-300 to try and limit the confusion)
SATA revision 2.0 (SATA 3 Gbit/s)
With a native transfer rate of 3.0 Gbit/s, and taking 8b/10b encoding into account, the maximum uncoded transfer rate is 2.4 Gbit/s, providing a peak throughput of about 300 MB/s.
SATA revision 3.0 (SATA 6 Gbit/s)
Provides a peak throughput of about 600 MB/s (Megabytes per second) including the protocol overhead (10b/8b coding with 8 bits to one byte).
Ref.
My realisation came about today through a conversation I had with Hadley Willan (aka Hadders). He’s a gold mine of tech info; I wish he would blog these gems more often…