I have a Western Digital Blue HDD which supposedly has a transfere rate of 300MBps, but I have just backed up my user folder and noticed that the tranfere speed was only at 30MBps, why doesn't it use the full 300MBps?
I am not sure, but I do not believe your motherboard can handle Sata3.
So the reason is then is because my mobo is only SATA II then it is limited to slower speeds?
The indicated speed is theoretical it is not guaranteed to reach that. Nor it is ever possible to retain such a high-speed. You only get such speed in burst, never for long file transfers.
The WD Blues do not come in SATA III speeds .. only SATA II @ 3GB/sec.
I'm running a WD Black SATA III in my SATA II system and it does benchmark a little faster but probably only due to the 64MB cache.
Either way .. the transfer speed is probably faster than the mechanical HDD can read/write
SATA II is also called 3 Gbit/s. That is 300 gigabits per second. If you take 300 gigabits per second and turn that into megabytes per second. Mathematically, with overhead, this brakes down to about 300 megabytes per second max.
However, there is no mechanical single spinning drive that can hit 300 megabytes per second. In fact, nearly all SSD's cannot go that fast either. About the best that you will get with a standard 7,200 RPM spinning drive is around 100-120 megabytes per second.
I've got some WD Caviar Blue's at work and with benchmark software (Sisoft or HDTune) they get about 85 megabytes per second.
If you copy real world files though from the device and to the device....expect things to slow down as it's both reading and writing to the same device. And depending upon whether they are large contigous files or tons of small files will also impact your speeds.
A WD Blue SSD Benchmark .. isn't even up to SATA II speeds
And a WD Black SATA III (64MB cache) in a SATA II mobo ...
Quote
