Only getting SATA II on GA-P55A-UD3 Motherboard

[zooplibob]

I just got a Corsair Force SATA 3 180 GB SSD, and plugged it into one of the 2 SATA3 jacks on the Gigabyte GA-P55A-UD3 motherboard. In the BIOS, I selected AHCI as well as enabling the Gen 3 for SATA.

Windows 7 64-bit install went fine, and I didnt do any F6 or special driver loading during the install.

but when I run HD Tune, it shows this info for my drive:
Standard: ATA/ATAPI-0 SATA II
Supported: UDMA Mode 6 (Ultra ATA/133)
Active: UDMA Mode 5 (Ultra ATA/100)

The benchmark speeds I'm getting are consistent with SATA 2 (around 250 MB/s).

However the Marvel utility says current speed is 6Gb/s.

So it looks like the drive is only going at Gen 2 speed. How can I know for sure if I'm in 6Gb/s or 3Gb/s mode?

 

[RetiredChief]

Real life performance, Not going to see a biggy betwene the Intel Sata II ports and the mavel Sata III ports.

SSDs perform bestter with Intel iaSTor controller. SSDs take a hit when placed on marvel control effectively negating the Sata III bandwidth increase..

DON"T sweat Sequencial read/right benchmarks. ONE - High scores do not translate to High real life performance for an OS + Program dive. TWO Sequencial is least important matrix.

Us AS SSD to look at your drive, upper left will show:
.. Make and FW ver
.. Driver for Intel Chipset the best driver is iaSTor followed by msahci. If IDE it will also show "BAD"
.. Also will show if partitions are aligned properly.

There are some "real life" bench marks out there that shou that there is not a big diff operating a sata III SSD on Sata II vs SATA III, Yes there is some the key word here is not a Big diff.

Bottom line: instal on Intel Sata II port and use Intel's latest chipset driver. Don't run Benchmark, but be impressed with the great performance gain over what it replaced - a Mechanical HDD.

PS Your bench mark program uses data that is Highly compressable, not real life like. AS SSD comes closer (still not perfect) while I find the best to be PCMark Vantage for simulating a real user experience.

 

[zooplibob]

Thanks for the response. But my concern is that Im on SATA II on the Marvel ports. How do I know if I'm running SATA II or SATA III?

Also are there any more realistic benchmarks I can run to compare performance on the Intel vs Marvel ports?

 

[RetiredChief]

Myself I use AS SSD, use to use crystal diskmark.
AS SSD uses data that is not readly compressable so closer to real life.

As to ports. The 2 top ones are the Gsata, sata III ports, and the cluster of 6 are the Intel Sata II ports (ref page 7 of manual).