SATA Bottleneck?

[A/Ox4]

I am trying to chase down what I think is a SATA bottleneck, however I may just be misunderstanding speed ratings. Hopefully I can get some help.

 

I have a 4TB WD Blue HDD 5400rpm as a storage drive (1080p and 4K video files mostly). During drive to drive transfers I am getting around 125MB/s. I did a CrystalDiskMark test which gave me similar results. It is a SATA drive (SATA III best I can tell). I have it connected to an Asus X570 TUF Gaming motherboard with its included SATA cable. I would like better performance than the 125MB/s I am getting. This drive was purchased in 2017 and seems to have no reliability issues. I am not against buying a new drive, but being that it's 4TB that means cost skyrockets when you consider SSDs at those sizes.

 

Are these speeds realistic, or is there a bottleneck?

Thanks in advance.

[Electronics Wizardy]

This speed seems normal

 

One thing is this drive is half full, and as you use more space on a hdd, the speed goes down(just due to how the platters are designed, all drives do this).

 

A larget or higher speed drive will be faster, but not that much faster, get a ssd if you need speed.

[it_dont_work]

Pretty normal speeds for spinning rust, I'm not sure what your expecting. The bottleneck is the mechanical nature of the drive itself, unless you get a higher rpm dirve or short stroke the current drive your not going to find more performance  

[Oshino Shinobu]

SATA III is 6Gbps, which is 750MBps. Definitely not an issue with SATA. Even SATA II is 375MBps, so that wouldn't be an issue either. 

 

What you're getting is pretty normal for a WD Blue. You can try tiered storage where you use an SSD to cache larger HDD(s) which can help with a lot of I/O heavy operations but for large sequential transfers, you'd really need to move to an all SSD setup if you want significantly faster transfers, or start looking into options like RAID 10, which give performance benefits. 

[WereCatf]

1 hour ago, A/Ox4 said:

I would like better performance than the 125MB/s I am getting

Might as well be asking for the moon from the sky. Mechanical HDDs are slow, period, and there is literally nothing you can do about it other than tossing the HDD out and swapping in an SSD instead. Less than 200MB/s read-/write-speeds are exactly what one can expect out of HDDs.

[SkilledRebuilds]

10 years ago those 5400rpm drives were sub80MB/s

Maybe today you can get 200MB/s in some edge case 7200rpm drives (when empty)

[A/Ox4]

16 hours ago, WereCatf said:

Might as well be asking for the moon from the sky. Mechanical HDDs are slow, period, and there is literally nothing you can do about it other than tossing the HDD out and swapping in an SSD instead. Less than 200MB/s read-/write-speeds are exactly what one can expect out of HDDs.

Thanks everyone. I guess my bottleneck is the drive then. I was going off of the SATA rated speed, but wasnt considering that hardware itself may not be able to keep up with that.

 

My other drives are a NVMe PCIE 3.0 Samsung EVO 970 500GB (OS) and a 250GB Samsung EVO 870 Sata SSD. The Sata SSD is pretty much utilized. I have it set as a cache drive for my Adobe applications, but its otherwise empty and unused (left over from before I had my M.2 drive). I suppose my best route would be to get a large SSD or a RAID setup.