SATA speed for 2009 MBP

[09283678]

okay so my hard drive is starting to fail, and i'm looking to replace it. i would ideally like to put in a wd scorpio black at 320gb.

my question lies within my mbp. it's a 2009 13" model (after the june update), and it says my sata link speed is 3. does this mean i'm confined to any drive that supports sata 2, or can i increase the speed to use this sata 3 drive?

if not i can just get the scorpio blue, but i would prefer to use the black.

thanks for the help!

 

[simsaladimbamba]

S-ATA 3.0 Gbps (S-ATA II) is compatible with S-ATA 1.5 Gbps (S-ATA I), S-ATA 3.0 Gbps (S-ATA II) and S-ATA 6.0 Gbps (S-ATA III) HDDs and SSDs, but HDDs are so slow (80 to 115 MB/s), that they won't even saturate S-ATA 1.5 Gbps (S-ATA I) (around 148 MB/s).

Thus using any S-ATA HDD (I, II or III) on a faster S-ATA interface will not get you faster speeds.

 

[iThinkergoiMac]

3 as in 3 Gbps, the speed of SATA II, you do not have SATA III.

That being said, no hard drive can come close to saturating the full speed of SATA II (not without RAID or ridiculously high RPM specs), so getting a Scorpio Black would give increased performance. SATA III is backwards compatible with SATA II, so if the Scorpio Black you're looking at says it is for SATA III, that doesn't really mean anything. Since it can't even come close to fully saturating a SATA II connection, making it specifically compatible with SATA III changes the performance not at all.

 

[09283678]

ah, i didn't know it was backwards compatible.

thanks for the help guys! i'm not fully read up on things like hard drives, so i appreciate the info.