Hi all,

I just purchased this hard drive (300gb Maxtor DiamondMax 10 [7200rpm]):
http://www.memoryexpress.com/index.p...ctID=6164&SID=

I got everything moved over from my old hard drive relatively easily, but I had a few questions that maybe someone can help me with.

The "external data transfer rate" (listed on the above link) is 150mb/sec. When I use "hdparm -tT /dev/hda" I am only getting around 60mb/s on a normal read. Is this correct, or does the external data transfer rate mean something else. In case this helps, here is my hdparm output of the drive (btw if you see any good ideas for optimizing the flags, let me know as these are still the settings for my old drive):

/dev/hda:
multcount = 16 (on)
IO_support = 1 (32-bit)
unmaskirq = 1 (on)
using_dma = 1 (on)
keepsettings = 1 (on)
readonly = 0 (off)
readahead = 256 (on)
geometry = 36483/255/63, sectors = 586114704, start = 0

Thanks for any ideas!

UPDATE:
Don't know why I didn't research around a bit more first , must be drained from the switch over, but I found some more information on the topic (http://www.storagereview.com/guide20...nterface.html).

Any insights are still helpful, but I realize now the external data transfer rate is different from the internal rate (which hdparm reports, I assume).

Mechanical hard drives are limited by how many platters and bits per centimeter. SATA controllers can not go up to 150 megabytes per second because they are limited by the PCI bus which has the top throughput of 133 megabytes per second. The true unit is megabits for SATA instead megabytes that a lot of manufactures advertise.

Like many things having to do with HDs the 150 is a lie. It is the internal transfer rate from the cache to the controller that being said you are doing extremely well at 60 my SATA does in the mid 50s which is just about 50% faster than my IDE dma100 which gets in the mid 30s both being 8mb cache 7200rpm drives identical models except for the controllers.

Thanks for all the clarification guys. I don't want to take the SATA plunge yet, as I sometimes still plug in older IDE drives from other computers and the like. Good to know the speed is up there though, sure would be nice to get 150mb/s though hehe.