New SATA III HDD speed slow!?!?!?!?!?!

[nostaw5]

Hi I purchased a new WD Caviar Blue WD5000AKX 500GB SATA 3 16MB cache drive to replace my burnt out seagate 320gb drive which was sata 1.

The seagate drive ran at 100mbps on hd tune.

I was looking on HD tune and the speeds are only 133mbps max 113 min (see attachments) This seems slow for a sata 3 (6GBps, (600MBps))

My motherboard (ga-ma78lmt-s2) has sata 2 (3GBps) ports capable of running at 300mbps.

The drives are both set up for AHCI. and i have the latest drivers for the ports.

am i doing something wrong? Im fairly sure SATA 2 can operate at much higher speeds?

IN a nutshell the SATA 2 ports can theoretically run at 300MBps read/write and with a SATA III drive the HDD and ports should reach that speed with ease!

Thanks

Alex

 

[kbrady1979]

It's a mechanical hard drive. I have a Seagate Barracuda that is SATA III and plugged into a SATA III port on my Asus Z77 Sabertooth motherboard and my hard drive seq read/write speeds are only 160 MB/s.......because it is a mechanical hard drive.

Those speeds are just a maximum theoretical "cap" meaning IF you have a drive capable of it, this is the fastest you can go. Mechanical hard drives will never reach the SATA II or III barrier. You need an SSD for that.

 

[nostaw5]

I see..... bummer. I guess you get what you pay for. and in this case, i payed too much for something that should be less >.<

 

[kbrady1979]

Sorry man. Look at it like this.......when you do decide to upgrade to an SSD, you already have a really good HDD for bulk data storage.

 

[neo101]

Caviar Black 2TB for you to compare

Novabench
Western Digital Caviar Black 6GB/s sata (Score: 22)
- Primary Partition Capacity: 250 GB
- Drive Write Speed: 65 MB/s

I do video editing etc with these - more than happy!

SSD's are over-hyped, overpriced, short life

Price recently dropping to nearly £100 in UK inc vat/taxes

 

[nostaw5]

Yeah an SSD is expensive for me right now, heck a HDD capacity is the only part of a pc i dont really keep up to date with. 500GB is more than enough for my games and OS. I only have about 20 songs since i live stream radio instead.

and my mobo would probably need to have SATA III ports to get any speed benefit from the SSD.


Thanks for your answers though!

 

[bassfisher6522]

What about a BIOS update....sometimes with a BIOS update it fix such issues.

 

[kbrady1979]

An SSD, even running off of a SATA II port, would be exponentially faster than your hard drive. In fact, you will see more of a difference going from a HDD-->SATA II SSD than SATA II SSD--->SATA III SSD. The places where an SSD makes a noticeable difference are apparent when using SATA II or III.

 

[bassfisher6522]

The latest version for your mobo is F14 from 2011...

GIGABYTE - Motherboard - Socket AM3 - GA-MA78LMT-S2 (rev. 3.x)

 

[nostaw5]

yeah i have the f14 update already, i like to keep up to date with all updates xD

thanks for the sugestion, infact if you want to go deeper, im looking for a modded one i did that for my acer laptop and it unlocked extra features