Best way to test SATA3 performance on my new hard drive

Diss · 7 Sep 2011 at 20:16

First time i have sata 3. If i look at the windows experience scores for data transfer on my old PC versus my new (Sata2 vs sata3) they both have the same data transfer score of 5.9. Seems wrong.

whats the best way to test and what sort of results should i expect for standard sata2 and sata 3 drives?

many thanks

diss

Gregry254 · 7 Sep 2011 at 20:34

try crystal disk mark, it is what I used earlier

Moothead2 · 7 Sep 2011 at 20:45

What HDD do you have? Most, if not all, regular HDDs (Not SSDs) cannot even saturate the bandwidth SATA 2 provides and therefore plugging a HDD into a SATA 3 port will provide no increase in speed. SATA 3 is only useful for SSDs at the minute.

Diss · 7 Sep 2011 at 20:51

thanks both

Its a 2TB WD Black. It does feeel quicker but then its on a new install.

Am downloading Crystal and will run it on both systems and see what it says.

As a matter of interest whats the best tool for testing USB3 speeds?

thanks again

Diss · 7 Sep 2011 at 21:01

Gregry254 said:
try crystal disk mark, it is what I used earlier

hmmm - sorry to be dumb but how tdo you actually run a speed test with this?

thanks

Gregry254 · 7 Sep 2011 at 21:43

Just click the "all" button

Diss · 8 Sep 2011 at 15:39

Gregry254 said:
Just click the "all" button

doh!!

had downloaded the info prog rather than the mark prog

results coming up - it seems the sata3 drive is considerably faster

Diss · 8 Sep 2011 at 15:47

here are the results of a sata2 (WD 1TB) vs a sata3 (2TB Black) - all results are MB/s and in the format sata2/sata3.

Seq
READ 96 / 151
WRITE 95 /147

512k
READ 34 / 54
WRITE 56 / 97

4k
READ 0.49 / 0.68
WRITE 1.06 / 1.49

4k Qd32
READ 1.03 / 1.56
WRITE 1.12 / 1.67

Does this look about what you would expect?

thanks

diss

-Mike- · 9 Sep 2011 at 00:17

Its not really that the sata 3 drive is faster, you'd get the same performance on a sata 2 controller from that drive. Its just that the drive itself is quicker than your old one and undoubtedly the new one is empty?