HP Pavilion dv6t-7000 Quad Edition - Sata II or III?

[huangcck]

You know, it really shouldn't be this hard to find information about a laptop, but I've been on this forum more in the past months than I've ever been on any forum trying to find info for my laptop. Even the manual is so vague, often leaving out crucial details. It took a month to finally resolve the mSATA issue but now I have similar question on the regular HDD and just couldn't find any info. I've already read several archived threads on this topic here and none of them has a direct answer.

Now according to this thread, anything above a DV6-6000 with 2nd generation icores should be SATA III. It makes sense because the Dv6t-7000 options allow you to put in a 2.5" SSD instead of a HDD and even the mSATA port is SATA III 6 gbit/s transfer.

https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Hardware-and-Upgrade-Questions/HP-DV6T-compatible-with-SATA-I...

However, the HDD I have is the 7200 rpm Seagate and it is listed as a SATA III 600gbit/s transfer at 600mb/s.

https://www.hdsentinel.com/storageinfo_details.php?lang=en&model=SEAGATE%20ST750LX003-

But the Crystalmark Info states transfer mode is in fact SATA/300 | SATA/300. So if the HDD is SATA/600, then doesn't this mean the port is SATA/300?

Is there something wrong with my setup? Everything was default from purchase. If the HDD is SATA III and the interface is SATA III, why is it running at SATA II?

Thanks

[Huffer]

I can't argue with your logic and vaguely recall someone else making this discovery a while back. Might try something like Sisoft Sandra to double check the specs of the interface as opposed to the SATA mode of the disk. 

[huangcck · Accepted solution]

I think I might actually have the answer. Apparently there is a hybrid version of this HDD with 8GB of SLC NAND chip installed. They both use the exact same serial number. 😑

I didn't think a pure HDD can reach 600mB/s transfer. and according to Seagate, their generation 1 HDD is only 300mB/s Sata II. It only listed the 500GB version in the generation 1 HDD b/c all 750GB and larger are now completely replaced by the hybrid and you cannot buy a pure platter one anymore.

Well, I guess this is good news if I want to upgrade the 2.5" HDD to a SSD in the future.

Thanks for the link, always appreciate a new tool to scan the system!

[Huffer]

Just for the record you can put a SATA III SSD on a SATA II interface and performance is not compromised much in ordinary operation. Still very fast. 

[huangcck]

Just curious, is that because the speed increase is mostly based on the 4k random IOPS? 

[Huffer]

No its because one almost never utilizes the maximum theoretical transfer speed of the drive except during transfer of large files. SSD on SATA-II still has a response time much better than HDD.