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I recently bought a 1TB WD drive which said "Interface: SATA 6 Gb/s" but when copying/transferring files the speed is 35MB/s.

do you need special cables to get that rate?

Jim
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  • Could you describe the computer that you're using a bit better? How new is it? Does it have 6 GB/s SATA support? Are you copying the files from one drive to another, or from one folder to another on the same drive? – Kenster Jul 06 '14 at 14:06

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That only refers to the interface compatibility. It's a bit of false advertising. Instead of 6Gb/s they could just use the term SATA-3. So your hard drive is fully compatible to SATA-3 which has a maximum theoretical throughput of 6Gb/s.

You do not need any special cables for SATA 3, your current transferring rate is absolutely normal for an HDD. To get to the maximum speed of SATA 3 you would need a modern SSD.

Modern HDDs are capable of getting to burst rates of ~150MB/s and average read/writes of 60-80MB/s but that only goes for the multi disk 2TB+ drives.

timonsku
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    I don't see why SATA 3 exists. Even SSDs don't run that fast. – Wutaz Jul 06 '14 at 15:51
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    Quite the contrary, SSDs are already getting heavily bottle-necked by SATA3. Its 6Gbit/s not GByte/s. With protcol overhead and encoding you get a transfer rate of about 530-600MByte/s. Usually 550 is the maximum that is achievable. Current generation M.2 SSDs or Sata Express SSDs can get to far more than 1 GByte/s. Even older PCI-E SSDs that have an internal RAID 0 are achieving over 2Gbyte/s. SATA 3 is very limiting and is bascially the end of the specification as it stands right now, its just too limiting, hence the reason why the new Sata Express is using PCI-E and isn't called SATA-4. – timonsku Jul 06 '14 at 16:21
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    Okay, I see what I did there. I saw a PCIe SSD and thought it was going slower than SATA 3 allows. I never check if it's GB/s or Gb/s. Now I don't see why that distinction exists ;) – Wutaz Jul 06 '14 at 21:40