I'm so confused with my HD speeds. Please help!!

plagasx

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Aug 6, 2008
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Hey guys,

I just installed my new WD black Caviar 500gb 32mb cache HD on Windows 7 in achi mode.. And I'm having problems figuring out if I'm getting the right speeds I'm supposed to with it. (Sata II 3.0gb)

Now for some reason my Windows 7 is reporting that I am running in something called Multi-DMA mode 2...??? According to what I have researched is a really slow speed. However I ran some benchmarks and tests and heres some pics showing everything:

capture4u.jpg


capture3gy.jpg


captureiq.jpg


I just need to know if I'm getting the right speeds I'm supposed to because it just doesn't seem like it...

Thanks!




 
You have to understand that even though SATA-2 is rated at 3.0Gbit/sec (about 300MByte/sec), there are very, very few drives that can actually transfer data at anything close to that rate of speed. Some SSDs can get up above 200MByte/sec, but individual hard drives are closer to 100MByte/sec.

Interconnection standards like SATA are designed to last for several years - as such they need to be considerably faster than the fastest drives available when they are introduced so that they don't become instantly obsolete. This is why SATA-3 (600MByte/sec) is being introduced now - the fastest SSDs have just about reached SATA-2's capacity. There won't be any 600MByte/sec drives available for quite some time, so SATA-3 will be a viable connection standard for at least a few years.

Your transfer rates of over 90MByte/sec are pretty typical for a hard drive.
 

Mimoso

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Oct 30, 2009
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The maximum speed you will get from a device running in multi-word dma mode 2 is about 15 MB/s. Are you sure you're looking at the settings of the new drive?
As sminlal said, the test results from HD Tune are perfectly normal.