There is no such thing as "SATA II drives", stupid

MY RECENT article hinting about the availability of a firmware update for Western Digital Serial ATA hard drives sparked an informative e-mail from one of our readers, reminding us why it's oh-so-wrong to call a spinning disc a "SATA II drive"

This reader from Portugal pointed to the official document from the Serial ATA International Organization (SATA-IO) titled "Dispelling the Confusion: SATA II does not mean 3Gb/s". This document admits that "3Gb/s has become synonymous with SATA II", and begins by saying "The term SATA II has grown in popularity as the moniker for the SATA 3Gb/s data transfer rate, causing great confusion with customers because, quite simply, it's a misnomer"

Our reader said: "The 3 Gb/s interface is just one of several extensions to the original SATA standard that was defined by the SATA II committee. In fact, considering that no single SATA drive can actually sustain transfer speeds above 150 MB/s (not even 100 MB/s), the faster interface is probably the most useless of the new features defined by the committee. It'll only give you an advantage when using port multipliers. NCQ, staggered spin-up and hot-plugging all make a much bigger difference, especially in server environments. The 150 GB Raptor, for example, supports all those features, but uses a 1.5 Gb/s interface (which doesn't prevent it from being faster than drives with a 3 Gb/s interface, BTW)"

While the nice people at SATA-IO are right and while they might not like it, if you do a web search for "SATA II drive" on Froogle, you will find hundreds, probably thousands of sellers advertising kit as "SATA II hard drive". But that is wrong, very wrong. Even our resident guru Fudo committed the sin of using the "SATA II drives" moniker, once. I personally think he should face the heat, too.

"SATA II drives" is "Marketing FUD, misleading, meaningless, confusing, doesn't mean anything, and a misnomer!"

Our reader continued: "I would expect you to use proper, meaningful technical terms, instead of propagating marketing FUD. For all the talk about "marchitecture" in the INQ, it seems you're quite eager to adopt it.Let's say that, tomorrow, WD decided to start labelling their Raptors as "SATA-3" drives, due to their faster spindle speed (which, by the way, unlike the interface speed, does give them an advantage). Would you start describing Raptors as "SATA-3 drives", without questioning the term?"

While I was lying on the floor trying to recover, he continued "the problem with the term "SATA II" is that it doesn't mean _anything_. Any SATA drive can be considered "SATA II" (and it certainly is "SATA II compliant"). All that term does is create confusion, making people think that a "SATA II" drive is somehow incompatible with "SATA" controllers, or vice-versa. It's also misleading in that it makes people think that if two drives are described as "SATA II", they must support the same features, when in fact you can have completely different combinations of features in each drive". "So it's worse than meaningless. It's misleading. I can understand shops and marketing departments using the term, but I definitely don't understand how a (supposedly) well-informed IT journalist propagates the marketing misnomer."

While I initially thought this was a pointless argument like the whole "is it Linux or GNU/Linux?" debate, I stand corrected, and from now I will personally refer to any Serial ATA drives with a transfer speed higher than 150MB/S as SATA II drive, sorry, I mean “SATA 3.0 Gbit/s drive”. And you should too! [Yes, you too, Fudo].µ

L'INQS
SATA MATTER
SATA 3.0 Gbit/s
TechRepublic "explains the confusing nomenclature of the newest SATA standard"

See Also
My article which sparked the ire of the reader