W520 4270-CTO SATA speed

[tquade]

I just installed a 6Gb/s HDD in the subject machine and it is running at 3Gb/s. How do I get it up to 6Gb/s? What I have read hear (in this forum and the Intel spec sheet for the QM67 chipset) says it should run at 6Gb/s. Drive is an ST750LX003 installed in the standard drive bay (not in the ultrabay carrier).

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Ted Quade

[davidhbrown]

Do you mean that you aren't getting the speed you want/hoped for from the drive or that a tool like Intel Rapid Storage Technology (found on my computer; click Manage, then open Advanced) reports the interface is connected at 3Gb/s. This tool or something similar should, I think, report 6Gb/s. Some tools (thinking of HWiNFO64) just report the drive's interface, not the actual negotiated speed.

For what it's not worth, I own one of these hybrid drives, but I found that its underlying mechanism is slower than competitors (based on benchmarking) and my use of it (as a storage drive -- I boot and run apps from a mSATA SSD) did not take advantage of its flash cache, so it's now in my child's notebook where it's serving its optimal purpose as a boot drive. I guess all that means is I can't check whether would connect at 6 or 3 on my W520. Never thought to check while I was using it, sorry.

(The ultrabay is port 1 and also should offer 6Gb/s SATA III speed. mSATA is port 2; eSATA on W520 is port 3; eSATA on dock is port 4... ports 2+ are SATA II.)

[tquade]

Thanks again for your input.

I had jumped to my conclusion because the Windows Experience Index did not change with the new drive (it stayed at 5.9). I also ran PC Wizard 2012 which indicated that 6Gb/s was not supported. Since my original post on this matter, I ran Sandra which properly set out that the chipset was capable of 6Gb/s and that the HDD was at 6Gb/s (G3) and the CD was at 1.5Gb/s (G1).

Ted

[davidhbrown]

It seems clear that the Windows Experience is mostly hitting the platter, not the SSD cache on the hybrid drive. My mSATA SSD (RunCore 128GB) gets a Windows Experience score of 7.3, and that's at SATA II. So, your *effective* experience while using the cache might well be around that or better. Once the cache learns what to do.

Also, you should know that Lenovo does this thing in the BIOS that deliberately reports the chipset to be an earlier version so as to make it easier for large IT shops to maintain fewer system images. This gave some of us early purchasers a bit of a scare because misc utilities were incorrectly reporting that we had that faulty Sandy Bridge chip you might have read about.