Sata 3Gb/s connection running at 1.5 Gb/s with new SSD installed

ChrissedOff · 02 Aug 2016

I just upgraded a 2006 desktop PC with a 240gb Sandisk Ultra II SSD. The system is faster in all the areas I'd hoped for, but not as fast as it could be.

The Sandisk dashboard reports that the connection is only 1.5 Gb/s, even though the motherboard (Gigabyte M55 SLI S4) supports SATA 3 Gb/s (Sata II.) The Window Experience Index rates the drive at 6.9. Meanwhile, a Crucial BX200 drive recently installed in a 2010 thin-n-light laptop, also SATA II, rates a 7.7 in WEI, and the laptop generally feels snappier than the desktop even though it is overall a slower machine.

A few points: the desktop PC's mobo does not support AHCI, just IDE. I've optimized all the settings I know of to optimize, eg turning off prefetch and defrag etc. I'm using a 10-year-old SATA cable. I didn't find any obvious BIOS setting to tweak.

Any ideas?

ICIT2LOL · 03 Aug 2016

Hello and welcome Chris mate did you also update the CPU on this machine because the specs are telling me it was not released until 2008. AMD Athlon X2 5600+ - ADO5600IAA5DO (ADO5600DOBOX)
By the way if you look at this site GIGABYTE - Motherboard - Socket AM2 - GA-M55SLI-S4 (rev. 1.0) it gives drivers only up to XP though there are refs to more recent versions of Windows whether the support is that good would in my mind be debatable.

Having said that I am also of the opinion that being an older machine with that CPU and slower RAM that you might not be able to get the speed out of it because of what that CPU and RAM can handle - the SanDisk I also use in some of my machines and are as you say lightning fast but I think maybe it is being throttled by the other gear.

For example I have an older tester machine with a really great CPU (Intel Q9650 and 8GB DDR2 RAM) and even running with a nice Samsung 850 EVO it isn't real fast in boot up although once moving it is quick enough for most jobs.

Just by the by just because the manufacturers state that components will run at 3Gbs does not necessarily mean they actually do. A good example would be USB 3.0 over 2.0 they say it runs near ten times faster when in reality it is sometimes nearer 10% faster.

But I stand to be corrected on any of what I have said of course - you may get a different view from other members. Myself I wuld be quite happy with what you have got and if you need to go faster then you may have to look at a new board / system but that is down to your budget and choice of course

RoasterMen · 03 Aug 2016

Maybe because the SSD isn't really doing speeds of 3GB/s than what's advertised? Also try to change the SATA cable if you can find any extra ones.

ChrissedOff · 03 Aug 2016

Thanks for the replies and the research and the welcome.

Yep it's an old warhorse that I've upgraded on the cheap several times, going from an X2 3800+ to an X2 5600+ in 2009, and from an GeForce 7600GS to a Radeon HD4870 in 2010 (along with a new power supply to handle the increased wattage requirements.) It gets used now as my work-from-home computer, creating and editing Office docs and PDFs and playing the occasional older post-apocalyptic FPS (STALKER, Fallout 3, Metro 2033...) I believe it may last forever.

I do have the latest BIOS installed, and Windows 7 and 10 (although I downgraded back to 7 mainly for sentimental reasons) seem to run great.

I know (based on comparison with my 2014 i7-equipped Macbook Pro) that I'm not getting modern-day speed out of this machine. Still, even with a 1.5 GB/s SATA connection it's night and day compared to how the system ran with the invincible 10-year-old Hitachi Deskstar 160GB HDD I just removed.

I do have one unused SATA cable that should be newer than what I'm using that I can try swapping in.

ICIT2LOL · 04 Aug 2016

Yep mate as Roaster said and I eluded to what is advertised and what actually is produced is not always gospel. SATA cables for example vary a bit and the more expensive ones although not really expensive are usually a better quality forma manufacturing point of view.

One thing you will find might help is to follow this Optimize Windows 7 I use it on all my machines and for the sake of losing a bit of the "bling" like transparency for example it is worth while making some of the tweaks happen.

ChrissedOff · 04 Aug 2016

Thank ya, I've done many of those already. But I turned off transparency just now to see what happens (although I think the Athlon X2 5600+ OC'd to 3.1 as I have done is fast enough to do all the Windows window dressing without much trouble.)

I swapped in newish SATA cable that came with the drive adaptor as RoasterMen suggested, and even tried the other SATA II connection, and it's still at 1.5 GB/s according to the Sandisk dashboard program. And you know, that's fine. The old girl is running much quicker than she ever has before, a pretty good $65 upgrade. Cheers.

sdowney717 · 06 Aug 2016

Drive jumper set to 1.5?

ICIT2LOL · 06 Aug 2016

sdowney717 said:

Drive jumper set to 1.5?

Yep real good point missed that one

ChrissedOff · 08 Aug 2016

Hadn't thought of that. I will check. Would there be any rational reason to do ship an SSD with jumpers limiting performance?

TechnoMage2016 · 08 Aug 2016

sdowney717 said:

Drive jumper set to 1.5?

What drive jumper? SanDisk SSD's don't have a jumper! I have two of them!

One of them is in an OLD Toshiba laptop, and it too tach's out at 1.5, not 3.0, or 6.0.
The SATA data port on the Laptop is only a SATA I (1.5), so it does the best it can.

No matter how fast the drive is, it can only ship data at the speed of the SATA bus on the motherboard, and that has NO relationship to cpu or ram.

However, on my desktop PC that I built last year, I have a SanDisk SSD, rated at 6.0 transfer speed and according to the SanDisk Dashboard, the drive is doing just what it's supposed to do.
But it is connected to my Gigabyte motherboard, via a SATA III data cable, plugged into a 6.0 (SATA III) port on the motherboard. To get the full SATA III speed, all components of the data path must be SATA III.

But like the man said, the old PC with the SanDisk SSD does run a lot better than it did with the original spinner. In an SSD, data access is almost instantaneous.
Another great plus, is that the SSD draws less current and produces less heat than a spinner.
So SSD's just make great upgrades for any Laptop.

Cheers Mates!
TechnoMage