Is Sata II / 2 fast enough for Mechanical drives?

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cgtechuk

Member
Dec 27, 2016
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just a quick one I have the Gigabyte GA7-PESH2 Motherboard which has the LSI-9211 SATA 3 on board SAS controller as well as another LSI Sata II controller onboard . I have used all the ports up on the 9211 and want to add more drives.

My question is this, As an Esxi host will there be much of a performance hit if I use the SATA II controller with the mechanical drives (No SSD) they wont be in RAID or anything just simple drives serving as datastores.

Reason I ask is that if a drive copies at 160MB/s roughly max then surely that is barely pushing SATA I territory never mind II or have I got this totally wrong and I will notice a considerable performance loss?

Drives are Seagate 2TB SATA drives if that helps
 

Evan

Well-Known Member
Jan 6, 2016
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Not having looked at the block diagram of your board so assuming no controller bottlenecks and assuming noting funny with that controller and you OS then to answer the question very generally.... it's enough, you won't saturate it with a spinning disk.
 

cactus

Moderator
Jan 25, 2011
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I have that board and am using it as a freenas box. It is 4 SATA ports off the C602. I have an R10 of WD Raptors on those ports, so they are SATA2 anyway. In a few years, you might see some slowdown on sequential speed, He12s are close to 255MB/s at the OD, SATA2 should get closer to 300MB/s. 2TB makes me think it is an older drive, so you'll be fine.