SATAII or SATA3?
 

WD Black 1TB's, only about $9 between them. I'm still running a P45 board, but I will be uppgrading soon. I presume the SATA3 would be backwards compatible?

Sata 6GB/s is backwards compatibale....and to be honest its wasted on a HDD. It will improve its burst speeds, but HDDs real speed is barely saturating a SATA 1 bus!

You can have a 6 lane highway....but if only 2 lanes are being used, you aint going to get to your destination any faster on a 6 than on a three lane one. ;)

Unless you want 6GB/s hdd, I'd get whatever is cheapest. YMMV.

^ +1

but are you saying they're charging an extra $9 for SATA3 on the blacks?

$124 vs $115

that's flippin' stupid. On a SSD I could see the marketting behind that, but on an HDD? dumb.

SATAII will do you fine.

It's also 64MB Cache vs 32MB

Which will have almost no real world impact on performance. Every time they make the cache bigger the amount of improvement it nets gets smaller and smaller. TBH 32MB is more than enough for most situations (hell 16mb was enough for most!) ;)

that might be the difference.

+1 on that too..

If you really want to spend the extra bucks, get the SATA 3 drive, and then when some new technology or a mobo that can fully utilize the sata 3 capabilities, you're all ready.. besides it's only $9 bucks..

A SATA 2 drive will do justice too.

Like everyone else said. A normal HDD max out at about 110meg/sec empty then slowly diminish. I have a green (1tb) and it's 82meg/s max. When SATA3 SSD with Controller will appear it will be another thing tought..