SATA II Misconceptions

[balilu]

Thanks to harmonicgen007 for the Heads Up.

Anandtech were testing some Retail SATA II Drives and they found out that although they are named SATA II they aren't capable of 3.0Gbps which is supposed to be in all SATA II Drives so they asked the SATA Organization about it.

"The first step toward a better understanding of SATA is to know that SATA II is not the brand name for SATA's 3Gb/s data transfer rate, but the name of the organization formed to author the SATA specifications. The group has since changed names, to the Serial ATA International Organization, or SATA-IO." - SATA-IO, [url']http://www.sata-io.org[/url]

They Found out that the SATA II which was announced and that was said to reach 3.0Gbps is now named SATA-IO.

This is what they found out:

The three main misconceptions are that:

"SATA II" has now been renamed to SATA-IO

SATA-IO must support 3Gbps transfers

SATA-IO must support features like NCQ and Hot Plug

Just because the SATA-IO committee identifies capabilities like NCQ and Hot Plug, they are not required by any standard; however, any device identified as "SATA II" or "SATA-IO" (also mentioned as "SATA Gen 2" in some documents) are backward compatible with SATA I technologies. Frame Information Structure (FIS) based switching supposedly enables smaller RAID stripes to obtain near 2Gbps transfer rates, something not yet capable on existing U150 SATA devices. Getting the word out to IT managers and administrators that "SATA II" devices are not always what they seem now becomes a large challenge for the SATA organization.

This means that some drives which are named SATA II may not have NCQ and that every SATA II drive is backward compatible with SATA I

P.S. This is somewhat old news but still I posted it because it was never done. Thanks Again to harmonicgen007