Is SATA bandwith per Port or per Controller?

Posted by instanceofTom on Super User See other posts from Super User or by instanceofTom
Published on 2011-02-15T00:11:23Z Indexed on 2011/02/16 23:27 UTC
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hard-drive

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sata

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bandwidth

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limitations

I always assumed that it was per Controller channel, and that If I have 4xSATA 3.0Gb/s ports on my Motherboard then I should have a potential 12.0Gb/s of bandwith. However, after doing some searching I found conflicting information suggesting that if I had 4xSATA drives connected to my MB and were using them simultaneously each drive would get only 3.0Gb/s /4 = 768 Mb/s max bandwith. So I wanted to clear up my understanding.

Side question: Are there other hdd/ssd bandwith bottlenecks to be aware of? (Links to already answered questions are more than welcome)

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