Am I slowing my hard drives down?

[cpals]

I just upgraded some of my components and started thinking about my hard drives... they should be fine since they're SATA II and decent size, but I realized that my hard drive cage I bought years ago may be slowing it down?

I have two Chieftec SNT-2131SATA enclosures that I used to use for a little raid setup I had. Now I'm just using one drive for my OS and one for data - they're both SATA II.

Are the connectors on the Chieftec just passthroughs so if I put SATA II or SATA III eventually it will work or is it actually slowing the drive down to SATA I?

Thanks!

 

[Emulex]

run a benchmark the burst speed would show you the limit.

1.5gbps/3gbps/6gbps..

but yeah sata-III does like higher quality cables.

 

[cpals]

What software should I use to test speeds?

 

[tweakboy]

cpals use, a free app called "HD Tune" ,,, google her in.
gl

 

[cpals]

Results:

70-80 MB/s - Barracuda ST3250410AS 7200.10 SATA 3.0Gb/s 250-GB Hard Drive
100-130MB/s - Samsung Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s

Not sure why the big difference between the two.

 

[FishAk]

The Chieftec won't slow those drives down. Spindle drives can barely saturate SATA I, let alone SATA II.

 

[Zap]

Results:

70-80 MB/s - Barracuda ST3250410AS 7200.10 SATA 3.0Gb/s 250-GB Hard Drive
100-130MB/s - Samsung Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s

Not sure why the big difference between the two.

The Samsung is really just a faster drive. Seriously! The F3 is latest/fastest model. A Seagate 7200.10 is a couple generations old. If you want a faster Seagate you need a 7200.12 model.

 

[cpals]

I verified that the Chieftec is in fact NOT slowing anything down... at least with these drives. I hooked both drives up directly to the motherboard and got the same results.

 

[Emulex]

BURST cache speed would show the limit.

any drive can nail sata-1 in burst speed.