SATA II drive running slow like SATA I

[slowpogo2]

I have two WD Blue hard drives, 320GB and 160GB SATA II. I've been running the Windows 7 preview for a while and it's worked fine for almost everything. But I finally ran the Windows Experience Index and saw my hard drive was the bottleneck, scoring 5.9 while everything else was about 6.6-7.5.

I ran HD Tune and it says the main drive is running in "UDMA Mode 6 (Ultra ATA/133)". Isn't that IDE talk?!? I did the benchmark test and the drive never got above 110 MB per second.

In the device manager, the drive is listed as an "ATA" device but nowhere does it say "SATA", and there are no separate "Disk Controller" devices. My parents' computer has SATA 2 drives and in their device mgr (on Vista) it has a section for Disk Controllers with various SATA drivers.

I checked and there are no jumpers on the drive, which should make it run Sata 2. My motherboard is a recent Gigabyte AM3 supporting board. In the BIOS, the drives have always been set to run as SATA in AHCI mode.

Why is my drive running slow and not appearing as a SATA 2 drive? And how to fix it?

 

[Harvey]

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[zagood]

Numbers look fine.

 

[Russwinters]

SATA2 is 3Gbit so ~ 375MB/s peak bandwidth.


the fastest hard drive will go ~ 150MB/s, and im talking raptors.

UDMA = Ultra direct memory access. This just means the hard drives controller has direct access to the RAM, it basically saves CPU cycles by letting the hard drives controller do more of the leg work.


UDMA6 = 6gb/m theoritical transfer rate


I think they are up to UDMA 7 or 8 now though.

 

[aE0n]

Your drives are performing as they should. Just because SATA II can do 3Gb/s doesn't mean you will see those numbers from your drive. SATA is not your bottleneck in this case and only will be as you approach 180MB/s. The only way to improve your numbers is faster drives and only SSD approach those kinds of numbers for single drives.

 

[taltamir]

110 MB/s a second is EXCELLENT for a spindle drive...