Will older SATA drive in MP slow down other drives or SATA bus?

[Sean Dempsey]

I'm going to have an open drive bay in my new MP, and I want to take an old SATA 80gig drive an install windows (parallels) on it. I am curious though if this drive will effect the other drives on the machine, it is one of the earliest SATA drives, so it doesn't have near the performance as modern ones.

I know they used to say on an IDE controllers, it only can run as fast as the slowest device, is that true with the macpro drives, or can I run this older drive without concern?

[SDDave2007]

I would not waste the effort...
the MacPro specs say SATA II, min 3gig transfer rate.

I just bought 400gig Seagate drives on sale at Frys for $79..

[Sean Dempsey]

I would not waste the effort...
the MacPro specs say SATA II, min 3gig transfer rate.

I just bought 400gig Seagate drives on sale at Frys for $79..

The WD RaptorX 150gig is not SATAII or 3gig transfer rate, its 1.5, but people still use it an it works.

Why do you not think it is worth the effort? I know hard drives are cheap, but a 400 gig drive just to install a little Windows XP partition for parallels is way overkill, especially when I have the 80gig drives just sitting here.

[slughead]

I'm going to have an open drive bay in my new MP, and I want to take an old SATA 80gig drive an install windows (parallels) on it. I am curious though if this drive will effect the other drives on the machine, it is one of the earliest SATA drives, so it doesn't have near the performance as modern ones.

I know they used to say on an IDE controllers, it only can run as fast as the slowest device, is that true with the macpro drives, or can I run this older drive without concern?

The answer is no: the older 80GB SATA drive will not slow down the other drives.

[yippy]

No it will not slow down your other drives. The key difference between SATA and PATA is that SATA is designed specifically so that each device has its own bus so that they cannot affect each others transfer rates.