Ok.

I've been researching this for days and I'm finally giving up and I need to find out once and for all:

Is there ANY performance increase by going from a SATA-150 to a SATA-300 HDD? At all?

Here's the thing... I just purchased an Inspiron 1720 notebook. I want to replace this factory mainstream SATA HDD with 2 fast SATA HDDs.

And just so it's out there... The new Inspirons DO have SATA-300 capable controllers. My question is more regarding if doubling the bandwidth from 1.5 Gb/s to 3.0 Gb/s is beneficial at all.

I've heard that the extra bandwidth doesn't matter, as hard drives - especially notebook drives - don't even fill up the 1.5 Gb/s that SATA-150 is rated to provide.

Alternatively, I've read that if you have a SATA-300 capable HDD, you can still read and write from the HDD's cache at the full 3.0 Gb/s... improving burst rates and any long process which fills the cache with small enough chunks as it's writing or whatever...

Let's take Hitachi's Travelstar 7K200 drives. Some of them are SATA-150, some are SATA-300. That's really the only difference between the 2 sub-series; everything else is the same - including the 16 MB cache.

So, even though the throughput of these SATA-300 drives will never actually reach 3.0 Gb/s... (or even 1.5 Gb/s as I understand it... even in RAID) ...would there not still be a slight performance increase by doubling the bandwidth for at least the 16 MB of cache? Also... is there anything else regarding performance that I'm overlooking?

Don't tell me that SATA-300 sucks more power. I know that.


Thanks!