Hard Drive Benchmarking...

[Synaptic71]

I recently discovered that my Barracuda HD was operating in SATA I 1.5GB mode, as I read an article that suggested that I needed to remove a jumper to enable the 3.0GB SATA II mode. After a year, and not realizing, I finally removed the jumper.

I than ran an HD Tune test, and got similar numbers from before I removed the jumper, specifically on my read speeds. I needed to get rid of the 4 year old 18" SATA cables that were in my system, so I replaced them with SATA II compliant 10" cables instead. Still, the same numbers in HD Tune. Now, these numbers may be accurate for my HDD. I can build a PC, etc, but am still a rookie when it comes to crunching numbers, etc. Hence, my posts here on AT for help and understanding. Below is a screenshot of my HD Tune numbers. Perhaps someone here would be so kind as to analyze it, and tell me if those numbers are on target for a Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200 RPM, 32 MB cache hard drive. I notice that it is running in UDMA mode 6, and was also wondering if that also is the mode that this drive should be running at, for optimized speeds.

Thank you in advance..

 

[Dangman]

Those numbers seem about right for the old 7200.11 500GB drives.

 

[PigLover]

Very few, if any, consumer grade spinning disks can sustain transfer rates that need more than the SATA-I spec. Most of them come in between 70-100MB/s.

Some high performance spinning disks can come close to needing more. Raptors and 15k SAS drives (e.g., Cheetahs) can sustain 120-150MB/s under the right conditions.

SATA-II does help with short random reads/write performance if you have enough cache on the drive.

For most users most of the time you won't be able to tell the difference between SATA-I 150 vs SATA-II 300.

 

[Synaptic71]

Thank you both gentlemen!

I spent 2 days with this thread on another major forum only to bem et with half snide responses, and a lack of information.

Much appreciated!

 

[SicKlown42012]

The only tangible difference between SATA-I and SATA-II for consumer level HDDs is the addition of Native Command Queuing and hot-swap ability. NCQ can/may give you better performance when dealing with numerous small files, but it's more for server applications. Since most disk benchmarks only focus on sequential reads/writes, you will not see any difference in them.
You screenshot looks normal, except for the dips, but that's because you're using the drive while benchmarking. The only thing I can think to recommend is to go into Device Manager, select the drive, right-click, select Properties, then Policies, and make sure the options for Write-Caching are both checked. It might not show in HD Tune, but it'll help with general use since it'll help speed up writing to the disk.