When talking about cables, there is no distinguishing name as SATA 3 cable or SATA 2 cables. You can use any of the cables on the SATA versions to replace one another. But when the interface version is concerned, there is a whole lot of difference between the SATA 2 and SATA 3. SATA 3 has a transfer speed rate of 6 Gbps, while a SATA 2 version has a speed rate of 3 Gbps. This shows that a SATA SSD will give half the performance when combined with SATA 2, as it would when used with SATA 3. Newer versions of SATA always have a higher transfer speed than older ones.