Do I need a SATA 3 port for a SATA 3 HDD?

[oskarittopl]

Do I need a SATA 3 port for SATA 3 HDD?

Basically, I have a SATA 3 (600GB/s max), 1TB WD Blue HDD which is limited by my old motherboard which supports only SATA 2 (300GB/s max).

I want to know if I upgrade my mobo so that the HDD is connected to a SATA 3 port, will my mb/s increase?

Also my disk usage is capped at 50% and doesn't go above it. Does that affect the HDD speed? (When I did the benchmarks it didn't go past 50%).

These are my benchmarks
This is my HDD info. (look at the transfer mode).

 

[jay32267]

I want to know if I upgrade my mobo so that the HDD is connected to a SATA 3 port, will my mb/s increase?
YES

I'm not sure what the second question is asking. Why is it capped at 50%? How is it capped at 50%?

 

[USAFRet]

Do I need a SATA 3 port for SATA 3 HDD?

Basically, I have a SATA 3 (600GB/s max), 1TB WD Blue HDD which is limited by my old motherboard which supports only SATA 2 (300GB/s max).

I want to know if I upgrade my mobo so that the HDD is connected to a SATA 3 port, will my mb/s increase?

Also my disk usage is capped at 50% and doesn't go above it. Does that affect the HDD speed? (When I did the benchmarks it didn't go past 50%).

These are my benchmarks
This is my HDD info. (look at the transfer mode).

"I want to know if I upgrade my mobo so that the HDD is connected to a SATA 3 port, will my mb/s increase?"
No. A spinning HDD will not saturate a SATA II port like you have now.
Changing to a SATA III port will not make it faster.

 

[oskarittopl]

Two completely different answers to the same questions. Really confusing.

About that...

I'm not sure what the second question is asking. Why is it capped at 50%? How is it capped at 50%?

When I open task manager the disk never goes above 50% even at full load.

My guess was that the sata 2 connection was slowing it x2 (look at the transfer mode) but if USAFRet is correct then that would not be the case. This is a brand new, 1TB, Fully cleaned HDD. My previous hard drive had a normal 100% cap until one day it went down to 50% and I don't know why. It was a 500GB SATA 2 drive.

The only thing I can think of now is that the drivers are outdated but I spent a lot of time looking for drivers that needed update and I updated the ATA drivers and no difference. Perhaps I couldn't find the correct drivers. I would love if someone could help me.

Here is my PC info: https://imgur.com/a/HBkdiMp
My device manager: https://imgur.com/a/zGLOmA7

 

[USAFRet]

Two completely different answers to the same questions. Really confusing.

Consider this analogy:

You have a car with a top speed of 90mph (hard drive)
You are on a road with a 100mph speed limit (SATA II)
If you get on a road with a 150mph speed limit (SATA III)

You car will still not go faster than 90mph.

 

[oskarittopl]

Two completely different answers to the same questions. Really confusing.

Consider this analogy:

You have a car with a top speed of 90mph (hard drive)
You are on a road with a 100mph speed limit (SATA II)
If you get on a road with a 150mph speed limit (SATA III)

You car will still not go faster than 90mph.

Thanks a lot for the help. Any idea about the 50% 😀 ?

 

[USAFRet]

Thanks a lot for the help. Any idea about the 50% 😀 ?

What do you mean by "full load"?

 

[oskarittopl]

Thanks a lot for the help. Any idea about the 50% 😀 ?

What do you mean by "full load"?

Whenever I'm downloading a game or running the CrystalDiskMark or even starting up applications when the system starts up. The Disk usage never goes above 50%. Whereas I remember it always reaching 100% in my old HDD before something happened to it and it never went above 50% usage.

I really felt the disk was a lot slower than before and I remember that when I downloaded Fortnite onto it the"Read" graph was at 100% all the time while the "Write" graph looked something like that ___/``````\____/`````\_______/`````````\___/``````````````\______/`````
Sorry for the childish depiction 😀 I hope you understand.

 

[USAFRet]

Thanks a lot for the help. Any idea about the 50% 😀 ?

What do you mean by "full load"?

Whenever I'm downloading a game or running the CrystalDiskMark or even starting up applications when the system starts up. The Disk usage never goes above 50%. Whereas I remember it always reaching 100% in my old HDD before something happened to it and it never went above 50% usage.

I really felt the disk was a lot slower than before and I remember that when I downloaded Fortnite onto it the"Read" graph was at 100% all the time while the "Write" graph looked something like that ___/``````\____/`````\_______/`````````\___/``````````````\______/`````
Sorry for the childish depiction 😀 I hope you understand.

Getting data from the internet relies a LOT on how the server is giving it to you.
Up/down/up/down or fast/slow/fast/slow is absolutely normal.

Download performance is not an indicator of drive performance.

 

[oskarittopl]

Getting data from the internet relies a LOT on how the server is giving it to you.
Up/down/up/down or fast/slow/fast/slow is absolutely normal.

Download performance is not an indicator of drive performance.

Whenever I'm downloading a game or running the CrystalDiskMark or even starting up applications when the system starts up. The Disk usage never goes above 50%. Whereas I remember it always reaching 100% in my old HDD before something happened to it and it never went above 50% usage.

Any Idea why that would be the case? Maybe that's normal but I haven't realized? Perhaps I'm not measuring it correctly. Do you know any test that should use 100% of the disk so I can test my theory?

 

[USAFRet]

Any Idea why that would be the case? Maybe that's normal but I haven't realized? Perhaps I'm not measuring it correctly. Do you know any test that should use 100% of the disk so I can test my theory?

Copy a single large file (3-4-5GB) to and from another drive.

 

[oskarittopl]

My brain has just been melted.. I realized that half of my hdd was unallocated so I downloaded AOMEI and allocated my disk space properly and tidied it up so that the disk now has 500GB system reserved and 931GB for disk C:
I thought that would fixed the problem so I ran the CrystalDiskMark and looked in task manager.

33% disk usage at max load

I was about to cry when I looked again in the disk manager and saw THIS.

1/3 (33%) of the bar is system reserved
when there was only 500GB of allocated room the system reserved was also 500GB so the bar was 1/2 System reserved..

Now tell me WHY THE HELL is my task manager displaying Disk usage based on my system reserved space?!

 

[USAFRet]

My brain has just been melted.. I realized that half of my hdd was unallocated so I downloaded AOMEI and allocated my disk space properly and tidied it up so that the disk now has 500GB system reserved and 931GB for disk C:
I thought that would fixed the problem so I ran the CrystalDiskMark and looked in task manager.

33% disk usage at max load

I was about to cry when I looked again in the disk manager and saw THIS.

1/3 (33%) of the bar is system reserved
when there was only 500GB of allocated room the system reserved was also 500GB so the bar was 1/2 System reserved..

Now tell me WHY THE HELL is my task manager displaying Disk usage based on my system reserved space?!

"500GB system reserved" ??
No, that's 500MB.


The width of those bars is NOT representative of actual used space.
If it were, you wouldn't even see the 500MB partition. It would be a tiny slice. 0.05% of the 1TB space.

 

[USAFRet]

My C drive looks about the same:

Again...that width is NOT a representation of actual used space for each of those partitions.