hd controller and pci bus question

adl6009

adl6009

New Member
I want to update the hard drive in my samsung r580 laptop.  I see in HWiNFO64 that under drive controller it reads     Serial ATA 3Gb/s @ 1.5Gb/s.   Is that indicating that the drive is being limited to half its potential?  The drive is a segate st9500325as, which is capable of 3gb/s.  If it is limited is it in the drive settings (jumper settings)?
I am also wanting to add usb3 with an expresscard.  Under the pci bus for the express port it reads version 1.1 , a few lines down it reads maximum link speed: 2.5 GT/s.  I just read about gt/s and bi directional data rates for the 1.1 standard but my question is-  Will I be able to run a usb 3 external drive at or near full speed?  
Thanks for your help.
 
Yes, that means the drive is not running at full SATA Gen2 speed. This might be limited in BIOS, or the SATA controller might be SATA Gen1 only. You can check the SATA controller capability in HWiNFO under the PCI Bus tree.

A single PCI Express 1.x link (250 MB/s) will not provide enough throughput for full USB 3.0 transfer speed (~625 MB/s). However disk drives are not able to use the full USB 3.0 speed potential. You should consider the transfer capabilities of your drive as well and will probably find that it fits well.
 
So it says under interface speed supported: Gen 2 3.0 Gbs. To my untrained eye it looks like the drive is not operating at full speed capability. I wonder why? This is just as it came from the manufacturer, I have never opened it up.
 
I checked the bios and didn't see anything that looked like it was the culprit.  I am getting an 1t hgst drive and a usb 3.1 expressport add on card.  I am hoping to clone the drive this way.  The only unknown is if the laptop supports uasp for the advanced speed in usb.  If not then I will hope the transfer will go through at usb 3 speeds.  (250 mb/s vs 500 mgb/s)   The chipset is Intel HM55 (IbexPeak-M DH) running an arrandale core i5-430m, if anyone has the stats available off the top of their head that would be great.  I also picked up a hgst 1t 7400rpm sataIII drive and then maxed out the system ram at 8 gigs (1/4 of whats in the hdd).  The computer is a little old, circa 2010, but its been reliable.  After I get  it all up and running, with a good back up image, maybe I'll try to load w 10 and see what the future is.  Thanks to Martin for the help, and to anyone who took the time to read through.
 
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