HDD transfer rate

marc69

marc69

marc69

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Hi guys

I was wondering, what is the transfer rate for a sata II hard drive?

I'm currently running just 1 WD 160gb sata Hard drive and one IDE maxtor hard drive just to store pictures and things.

When running HD tune to see what the transfer rate is i'm only seeming to get 61.5 mb/s. My friend with a similar rig is getting maximum 192 mb/s and minimum 112.

I've took the hard drive out and coverd pin 5-6 which was suppose to allow a higher transfer rate according to the top of the hard drive but it's exactly the same speed.

I've took some screenshots incase i've missed anything out out.

http://i39.tinypic.com/308b0o5.jpg
http://i42.tinypic.com/2mzgnc8.jpg

Cheers
 
Some confusion there... IDE, SATA-I or SATA-II describes the interface and each has a theoretical maximum transfer rate. That doesn't mean the drive is capable of achieving the maximum speed, only that it is compatible with that interface.

Putting the jumper onto pins 5-6 reduces the maximum speed from 3Gb/sec down to 1.5Gb/sec (from SATA-II down to SATA-I). As you've noticed though - it doesn't make much difference because the drive isn't capable of transferring data at anywhere near the maximum speed.

This is also the reason why people use RAID, using two or more drives you can add the throughput of each together until you approach the maximum speed of the interface.
 
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Ah ok, so maybe this current hard drive just isn't that fast?

I also read that that this hard drive supports UDMA 6 but it's only using UDMA 5. I had a quick look in the bios but there was only an option to go upto 5 (Current).

Cheers for the help and anymore information you have to give on the subject ;)
 
marc69 said:
When running HD tune to see what the transfer rate is i'm only seeming to get 61.5 mb/s. My friend with a similar rig is getting maximum 192 mb/s and minimum 112.
Click to expand...
I don't know how your friend is getting those transfer speeds (assuming it's megaBytes/sec) unless he's using multiple drives in RAID 0 - AFAIK even the very latest high-density 1TB drives struggle to break the 130MB/sec barrier.

You could enable SATA-II interface speeds by running the drive in AHCI mode instead of IDE emulation, but I seriously doubt you'd see any improvement at all in real life, as it's the mechanical limitations of the drive which cause the bottleneck, as mentioned above - I think 60-odd MB/sec is about the best you could reasonably expect from that model... :)
 
Your friend is seeing the burst rate, which doesn't really mean much. The burst rate is when the drive is reading from it's cache, which will be as fast as SATA2 allows roughly 200MB/sec.

Your own speed is fine and what's to be expected from a drive with that kind of platter density.

What doesn't make sense is your friend getting a minimum rate of 112MB/sec. That's faster than a Velociraptor.
 
Cheers for all the replies.

It was infact my friends transfer rates which was were what worried me, I thought mine must be acting funny or something. He has a slight tendacy to "White Lie" so I'm guessing thats what's happening, hes using a Maxtor something or other, nothing expensive.

Thanks again for the replies, put my mind at ease atleast ;)
 
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