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Laptop SATA HDD backward compatible...?


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#1
brettt777

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I have an Asus G73jh that presently has two 500GB SATA3.0 HDD.s installed. I want to replace them with two 1TB drives but the only relatively inexpensive one I've found in SATA3.0 is a 5400 rpm device. Will a SATA6.0 drive work in a SATA3.0 system, just not as efficient as it would be in a SATA6.0 system, or is it a totally different device with different connectors, etc?


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#2
Trevorever

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You are correct. Well, mostly. With a 5400rpm drive, Sata 3 won't make anything faster. The drive spin speed is the bottleneck there. But it is definately backwards compatible. Does the drive you found happen to be a WD Blue drive?  If so, you might want to keep shopping around...


Edited by Trevorever, 11 April 2014 - 01:35 PM.

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#3
Kemasa

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The connectors are the same. It is not a matter of being effcient, it has to do with the maximum transfer speed. Kind of like a speed limiter on a vehicle.

 

You can use a drive which can do faster and it will slow down to what your computer can deal with (at least it is supposed to).

 

The rotation speed of the disk does not always make that much of a difference. It really depends on how you are using the disk. The faster it spins, the less time it has to wait until the data comes around to the head to read it. Faster spinning drives tend to also generate more heat and use more power, so if you are not doing a lot of disk activity, it might not matter much to you.


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