Sata III transfer.

Only go with SATA III if your motherboard supports it!

Just plugging in a SATA III hard drive into a SATA II port will reap no benefits! Plus, I think you have to jumper the HDD to make it work on SATA II.

I don't doubt that your SATA II drive (which one?) was "hoorifically poor," but maybe just getting a newer SATA II drive would be cheaper and better alround.

I suggest a Seagate 7200.12 or Samsung SpinPoint F3 drive, 500-1TB in size.

Don't worry about the cache size; 8,16 or 32MB. THe controllers are faster enough to not even need the cache anymore to hold data until the controller is ready.

SATA III is really for Solid State Drives, which are now getting faster than the SATA II controller can handle.

Hard Drives, even SATA III's, are way slower the bandwidth for controller they use. Even my 2x500GB Seagate 7200.11 in RAID 0 only peaks at 150MBps reads, which at max should be close to 600MBps.

Run some benchmarks on you current drive to see what you actually get. Try HDTune, which is free for 15 days.

Have you ran DiskCheck, CleanUp, and Defrag on the drive?

Anyway, to answer your question, some retail packages of hard drives included software to "clone" an existing hard drive.

Do you have the cash for a SSD? They are pricey, and small. But, prices are droppng, for the release of the next generation of SSDs. Look into Intel X25-M 80GB, or OCZ Vertex 2 60 or 100GB sizes. You really only need a smaller SSD for the OS and Programs, and keep your current HDD for data/media/backups.

Don't worry I made sure when I bought my mobo that it supported sata III, it's gigabytes X58-UD3R. It's not so much that my HDD is poor, but rather it's by far my worst component as I've never taken an interest in anything beyond capacity which in hindsight has been stupid. I'll try HDtune now  

Ok, great mobo. And yes, HDDs are the bottleneck on any system.

There are some pretty brutal burst drops there, nothing to worry about? I know it's not a terrible HDD, but I really like pushing my computer and it's just such a bottleneck for my system.

Running disk clean and then disk frag now. Is disk check a program?; can't find it in windows :S

In your HDTune graph, the fastest transfer rate is under 100MBit/sec. That speed can easily be handled by 1.5GBit/sec SATA. The drops in the graph have nothing to do with SATA. In fact there are extremely few hard drives that actually need more than 1.5Gbit/sec SATA, and NONE that need anything faster than 3Gbit/sec.

There's absolutely no need for a 6Gbit/sec connection on any hard drive - don't buy one expecting performance that's any better than 3Gbit/sec unless the drive itself happens to be faster (for example, denser platters mean a higher transfer rate). That's the only thing that matters - the performance of the underlying drive - all SATA II and SATA III drives are bottlenecked by the mechanics of the drive and NOT by their connection speed.

All drive manufacturers are moving to the 6Gbit/sec SATA chipsets, but their doing so because of industry standardization, not because the drives actually need them. The only case in which 6Gbit/sec SATA is required is for a few very fast SSDs and for external RAID arrays that connect via eSATA.

Guess it's not a part of Win7. Used to be called CheckDisk. Used to scan for bad sectors of the HDD.

sminlal's comments are right. No need for SATA III hard drives. You'd only be dissappointed in price vs. performance. Someone (I think RetiredChief) said he only saw a 10% gain in SATA III vs. SATA II hard drive; a Western Digital Black SATA III drive.

A large hard drive with the fewest platters will yield the fastest results. My 7200.12 1TB drive is actually faster than my 7200.11 500GB hard drive (alone) due to data compression of the disks. I get somewhere around 120MBps avg. reads?

I think you're thinking of "Chkdsk". It's still in Windows 7. You have to run a Command Prompt window in Administrative mode and then type in "Chkdsk x:", where "x:" is the drive letter you want to check.

Cheers guys, very helpful. Guess I'll just wait for SSD's to come down in price.

Found Chkdsk too  

Thanks sminlal!