I just bought my first Serial ATA drive yesterday ($20 sale). Being that it is the first time I used such a drive, I have done a lot of research on the SATA standard, but am still a bit confused. The drive I bought is a "Serial ATA/300". I assume that "300" means 300GB/s as opposed to 150GB/s. Is that right? What is the difference between SATA I and SATA II ( at first I thought it was the speed, but apparently that is a misconception)? Finally, SATA is hot swappable as I understand, is that dependant on the drive, the controller card, the operating system, or a combination there of?

PS: I have searched Google, but for every anser I find to those questions, I find another page with conflicting info.

-Ryan Adams
http://members.cox.net/rtadams89/

300 stands for 300mb/sec, not 300gb/sec.
It is a max data transfer burst speed rating - the drive can only achieve that for brief periods of time.
SATA drives that can achieve that speed are SATA-2 drives.
SATA, sometimes called SATA-1 now that SATA-2 is out, can achieve up to a 150mb/sec burst speed.
I don't believe SATA is hot swappable unless it is connected via USB 2.0 or firewire connections to a drive in an external enclosure, and in that case IDE drives are hot swapple too.

If you have a SATA capable mboard, but not a SATA-2 capable mboard, a SATA-2 drive may be detected by some mboard chipsets as a SATA drive and run at a max 150mb/sec, or some mboard chipsets will not recognize a SATA-2 drive at all unless the drive has jumper pins on it that a jumper can be installed on to limit what the mboard sees to SATA specs.
Some SATA-2 drivers have such pins (e.g. some Samsung), some do not (e.g. some Maxtor).

The best info is on the hard drive manufacturer's web sites.

No drive has a data transfer burst rate of 150MB/s or even 300MB/s. SATA1 and SATA2 have various specification differences, but the maximum bandwidth associated with each has no bearing on performance.

Just take a look at the maximum read transfer rate on this benchmark and you will see the fastest read speed is only 86MB/s.

Also, should be MB/s
mb = megabits/ses
MB = megabytes/sec

Michael J