New HD 6.0 not any faster than 3.0?

[pjmoses]

Hey Guys and Gals, I just put in a HD 2T|HITACHI HDS5C3020ALA632 that is a SATA II 6.0 and told the BIOS that it is a 6.0 drive, yet when I run WEI I get the same number as I did with my old Samsung HD, 5.9 score. Should this drive not give me at least a 7.0 or higher being a SATA II 6.0? I am a little confussed as the mobo states it should be very fast. My mobo is a M4A88TD-V EVO usb3.0. Any sugestions on how to make this drive run faster?

 

[gtvr]

No current mechanical HD can take full advantage of the SATA III (6gbp/s) interface. Most barely take advantage of the full SATA I (1.5gbps) interface.

That said, use a real disk benchmark for comparison, not WEI.

 

[varis]

That data you are giving is a bit confused - SATA II is a 3 Gb/s interface. SATA III is 6 Gb/s.

And that speed is just the theoretical speed of the interface the HDD connects with. It tells very little how much data the HDD can actually deliver. For example, consider that the current generation of SDDs on the consumer market can't saturate even SATA II - and best consumer HDDs are still somewhat slower than that.

Which model was the Samsung? Can you link to the specs of the Hitachi or perhaps a review, so we have some performance metrics for the 2 drives to compare?

 

[sminlal]

Think of SATA 3GBit/sec and 6Gbit/sec like highways with 30MPH and 60MPH speed limits. The speed limit sets the MAXIMUM possible speed, but it doesn't mean that every vehicle can actually go that fast.

A very fast SSD is like a car - it'll go faster on a 60MPH road than a 30MPH one. But a hard drive is like a bicycle - it can't even go as fast as 30MPH (usually), let alone 60MPH - so a bike won't get there any faster if it takes a freeway as opposed to a city street.

The reason hard drives have this limitation is because the data can only be read or written as fast as the platters spin. If a track holds 1MB of data and the platters spin at 7200RPM (120 times/sec), then the maximum data rate is 120MByte/sec (about 1GBit/sec). Without increasing the speed of the drive to something like 20,000RPM you're just not going to get anything more out of them than SATA 3Gbit/sec can give you.

 

[pjmoses]

When I got my M4A88td-v evo3.0 mobo, I was under the impression that the new SATA III 6.0 would read and write twice as fast as what I had. But I do not see any difference. It shows up as a 6.0 Sata III under Wininfo32. Is the 3.0 HD slowing down the whole system? I don't need it now that I have the 2 TB cloned.

 

[pjmoses]

How can they say it is twice the speed when it is the same RPM?

 

[gtvr]

Read sminlal's post again.

There is the max throughput of the interface (6.0) and the actual performance of a mechanical hard drive (much less). SSDs in general will make better use of the higher bandwidth, but still not the full 6.0gb/s.

 

[sminlal]

Is the 3.0 HD slowing down the whole system?

No, each SATA hard drive plugs into it's own port and each port negotiates the speed with the drive independently of the other ports and drives. Again, the fact that the CONNECTION speed is twice as fast has no bearing on whether the disk ITSELF spins twice as fast. The only way to get data off a disk faster is to either make it spin faster or to pack information onto each platter more densely so that you get more data for each revolution of the disk.

How can they say it is twice the speed when it is the same RPM?

All manufacturers are moving to the SATA 6Gbit/sec chipsets because that's the new industry standard. But it has nothing to do with how fast the drives can actually read or write data. It's like a keyboard - even though keyboards are advertised as using USB 2.0 you shouldn't expect it to magically transfer data at the full potential USB 2.0 speed (about 30-40MByte/sec) because you just can't type that fast.

 

[pjmoses]

If so, why make 6.0 at all? It would seem that 3.0 SATA II would be the max a hard drive can handle. I have a 500w PSU that cant handle two monitors an 3 HD with two HD 5770's hooked up so I am upgrading already to an 850 modular unit. Do you think my under powered build would contribute to the slow HD speed?

 

[pjmoses]

Oh, and the drive is a HITACHI Deskstar 5K3000 HDS5C3020ALA632 SATA III 6.0 I just added.

 

[gtvr]

sata III is for the latest SSDs and future technologies. There are still advances in HDs (mainly storage density) but nothing miraculous is going to happen with the transfer rates.

A power supply won't affect HD performance. If your system doesn't boot then your have a PS problem. If you start playing 3d games and it blue screens you could have a PS problem. HD transfer rates don't slow down with insufficient power.

 

[RetiredChief]

For HDDs, Sata 6 is just a marketing/advertizing Tool. (better word than "gimmick").
The ONLY benifit of a SATA 6 HDD on Sata 6 is in the burst speed.
sminlal gave an outstanding explanation.

 

[pjmoses]

Best answer selected by pjmoses.

 

[sminlal]

If so, why make 6.0 at all? It would seem that 3.0 SATA II would be the max a hard drive can handle.

It's the max that a current, single hard drive can handle, but other types of devices such as SSDs also use SATA and they require a faster connection. Again, it's like USB - just because keyboards max out at a few characters per second doesn't mean that USB 2.0 is fast enough for all devices.