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churin
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SATA3 Cable?

Wed Feb 06, 2013 9:16 am

I have noticed that there are SATA cables which are claimed to support SATA3 or SATA2. But it appears that any SATA cable since SATA1 works for SATA3. Is this correct?
Last edited by churin on Tue Feb 19, 2013 10:43 am, edited 1 time in total.
 
steelcity_ballin
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Re: SATA3 Cable?

Wed Feb 06, 2013 9:24 am

churin wrote:
I have noticed that there are SATA cable which is claimed to support SATA3 or SATA2. But it appears that any SATA cable since SATA1 works for SATA3. Is this correct?


Yes, I believe it is. The type of sata (1,2,3 etc) that you can work with depends on your motherboard and hard drive.
 
Arvald
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Re: SATA3 Cable?

Wed Feb 06, 2013 9:33 am

The cables are the same layout/ends. you would not likely have issues till you approach the highest speeds 3GB/S for SATA2.
or possibly running longer cables can be issues.

Not sure how tight the production specs on the cables were though
 
churin
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Re: SATA3 Cable?

Wed Feb 06, 2013 5:50 pm

Arvald wrote:
. . . . you would not likely have issues till you approach the highest speeds 3GB/S for SATA2. . . .

Do you mean not to mention SATA3? I meant in my original post that any SATA cable can supports 6Gbps transfer speed.
 
Chrispy_
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Re: SATA3 Cable?

Thu Feb 07, 2013 9:50 am

SATA uses differential signalling to offset outside interference. The cables are very simple with two shielded, differential pairs; One to transmit and one to receive.
All the other wires are just ground connections. Shielding between the TX and RX pairs is part of the spec, but common sense says that thanks to differential shielding this is largely unnecessary given the voltages, physical tolerances and layout of a SATA cable.

The SATA spec currently lists no difference in cable between SATA1 and SATA3. In theory, even a very cheap 1 meter (max length) cable ought to be capable of connecting two supporting devices at the full 6.0Gb/s SATA3 speed.
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Arvald
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Re: SATA3 Cable?

Thu Feb 07, 2013 12:13 pm

churin wrote:
Arvald wrote:
. . . . you would not likely have issues till you approach the highest speeds 3GB/S for SATA2. . . .

Do you mean not to mention SATA3? I meant in my original post that any SATA cable can supports 6Gbps transfer speed.

nope I picked SATA2 as an example.
 
Arvald
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Re: SATA3 Cable?

Thu Feb 07, 2013 12:14 pm

Chrispy_ wrote:
SATA uses differential signalling to offset outside interference. The cables are very simple with two shielded, differential pairs; One to transmit and one to receive.
All the other wires are just ground connections. Shielding between the TX and RX pairs is part of the spec, but common sense says that thanks to differential shielding this is largely unnecessary given the voltages, physical tolerances and layout of a SATA cable.

The SATA spec currently lists no difference in cable between SATA1 and SATA3. In theory, even a very cheap 1 meter (max length) cable ought to be capable of connecting two supporting devices at the full 6.0Gb/s SATA3 speed.


Industry Standard Spec vs Manufacturing tend to be 2 very different things.
 
churin
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Re: SATA3 Cable?

Thu Feb 07, 2013 1:06 pm

Arvald wrote:
. . . Industry Standard Spec vs Manufacturing tend to be 2 very different things.

For the present discussion, one has to assume that the cable satisfies the standard. Or, do you know of any brand of SATA cable which does not meet the spec? Have you seen any SATA cable being a bottleneck limiting data transfer speed?

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