SATA Iii port getting SATA II speed!

[ShovonKhan]

According to the spec my laptop's primary storage port is SATA 3 supported, but my HDD is running at SATA 2 speed. Can someone explain it? Is there any problem?

[SavageNeo]

Where does it say, that it runs at sata 2 speed

[Dujith]

5 minutes ago, SavageNeo said:

Where does it say, that it runs at sata 2 speed

Transfer speed  says SATA 300 thats SATA II SATA 600 would be III

 

As for the OP: That drive is SATA II, the motherboard interface might be SATA III but it will only operate like that if you connect a SATA III HDD. An 5400 RPM drive wont be fast enough anyway to use SATA III speeds

[ShovonKhan]

4 minutes ago, SavageNeo said:

Where does it say, that it runs at sata 2 speed

SATA 300 = SATA 2. Also in Intel RST it says 3Gb/s.

 

[NelizMastr]

1 minute ago, ShovonKhan said:

SATA 300 = SATA 2. Also in Intel RST it says 3Gb/s.

 

 

So what happens when you connect a SATA3 device? If this HDD is SATA2, that's all you will see.

 

That said, this HDD won't even saturate a SATA1 link (1.5Gbps) so it's not a big deal anyhow.

[ShovonKhan]

2 minutes ago, Dujith said:

Transfer speed  says SATA 300 thats SATA II SATA 600 would be III

 

As for the OP: That drive is SATA II, the motherboard interface might be SATA III but it will only operate like that if you connect a SATA III HDD. An 5400 RPM drive wont be fast enough anyway to use SATA III speeds

Just checked the spec, and yes you're right. So, if it was a 7.2k RPM drive, would I get SATA 3 speed?

[Dujith]

1 minute ago, ShovonKhan said:

Just checked the spec, and yes you're right. So, if it was a 7.2k RPM drive, would I get SATA 3 speed?

The link will be SATA 600 yes, the read/write speed wont however. Even the higher end HDD's will top out at 150 MB/s against the 600 MB/s that the SATA 3 allows.

Looking at your HDD size i would pick up a SSD, those will have higher sequential speeds. But more importantly higher IO when writing and reading small files (Windows usage). It will be night and day.

 

A budget SSD would be the something like a Crucial MX500 500GB at 65 ish Dollars

[ShovonKhan]

7 minutes ago, Dujith said:

The link will be SATA 600 yes, the read/write speed wont however. Even the higher end HDD's will top out at 150 MB/s against the 600 MB/s that the SATA 3 allows.

Looking at your HDD size i would pick up a SSD, those will have higher sequential speeds. But more importantly higher IO when writing and reading small files (Windows usage). It will be night and day.

 

A budget SSD would be the something like a Crucial MX500 500GB at 65 ish Dollars

So, this speed is okay for this HDD then?

[SavageNeo]

Just now, ShovonKhan said:

So, this speed is okay for this HDD then?

pretty normal yes, my 5400 rps run at 110-150 mb/s

[ShovonKhan]

14 minutes ago, SavageNeo said:

pretty normal yes, my 5400 rps run at 110-150 mb/s

Thank you for your replies. I'm planning on buying a 250/500 GBs SSD this month to use it as my boot drive. My laptop is being slowed down because of the HDD and I my 8GBs RAM can't keep Google Chrome happy, so need to upgrade it to 16GBs too.

[mariushm]

There's no correlation between rpm and transfer speed and the sata standard

A 7200rpm drive will be a bit faster, but not by much, if we're talking about a hard drive from the same generation and family.

 

Your motherboard's sata controller may be able to work in SATA 3 mode (up to 560 MB/s) but your hard drive can only understand SATA 2 mode (up to 300 MB/s). This is fine for you, because being a mechanical drive, it will never be fast enough to get close to 300 MB/s so this limitation is not a problem.

If you buy a mechanical drive that can "speak" SATA 3, then it will connect to the sata controller on your motherboard in that mode, but the maximum speed will still be limited by how quickly it can read the data from the discs inside. If the data is read at maximum 200 MB/s, that's what you're going to get... the drive can't magically transfer data at 560 MB/s or whatever.

 

Think of the data on your hard drive as written in round circles on a disc and let's say each circle has 1 MB of data and you need to read 10000 circles (10000 MB or 10 GB)

A 5400 rpm drive will make 5400 rotations in a minute (60 seconds) or 90 rotations per second, so it will read those 10000 circles in 111 seconds. It will have a speed of 90 x 1 MB = 90 MB/s

A 7200 rpm drive will make 7200 rotations in a minute or 120 rotations per second, so it will read those 10000 circles in 83 seconds. It will have a speed of 120 x 1 MB  = 120 MB/s

 

So you can see a 7200 rpm drive won't be twice as fast, it will be just a bit faster.

 

Newer drives will pack the data closer together on a hard drive.

So for example, while a 1 TB 7200 rpm drive from 5 years ago may pack 10 MB in a circle, but a 4-6 TB 5400 rpm drive from today may pack 30 MB in a single circle. So, even though it takes longer to make a full rotation, within that time the drive reads more data.

 

For the age of that drive, the speed you get of 100 MB/s or so, is good.

 

A SSD doesn't have to spin discs inside, so there's no concept of rpm, its speed will depend mostly on how many flash memory chips are used on the ssd (you get faster speeds by reading and writing to several memory chips in parallel, like with dual channel ram)... the cheapest chinese brands use only one memory chip which will give you slow speeds, while the budget SSDs will typically work with 4 memory chips in parallel to get faster speeds.

 

[demonix00]

As already mentioned the only reason why you're getting SATA II speeds is that is what the drive supports (the fact that the transfer mode section in crystaldiskinfo shows SATA/300 | SATA/300 instead of --- | SATA/300 means that the SATA port does indeed support SATA600) and if you got the laptop with that drive it's highly likely that the manufacturer was being a tight ass by using old stock as current drives regardless of their spin speed would support SATA600.