Help with Hard Drive Install on R3

MG1959,

Restart the system, press DEL to enter the System Setup. Go to Advanced- Standard CMOS Features. All of the SATA ports will be listed. Does the added drive appear in the list?

You have to setup the drive in Control Panel / Admin Tools / Computer Mgnt / Storage / Disc Mgnt.

http://www.ghacks.net/2010/09/15/how-to-configure-a-new-hard-drive-in-windows-7/

Chirs/Tesla:

I got the drive initialized and ran the windows back up and restore to get an image of the primary drive.  It took me awhile but I eventually found disk management and figured that out.  My 2 hard drives show in the CMOS as sata 1 and sata 2.  I hope I'm good there and didnt mess anything up.  

Is there a way to see if the hard drives are running sata 3 with the 6gb transfer rate?  Thanks for the help on a friday evening.

Try CrystalDiskInfo

crystalmark.info

or CrystalDiskMark to see if transfer speeds are about right.

Tesla:

can you tell me if these scores look correct for sata 3 performance.  The c drive looks half as fast as the new F drive I installed.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64 (C) 2007-2010 hiyohiyo

                          Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

          Sequential Read :   156.714 MB/s

         Sequential Write :   156.341 MB/s

        Random Read 512KB :    51.200 MB/s

       Random Write 512KB :    85.528 MB/s

   Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :     0.603 MB/s [   147.1 IOPS]

  Random Write 4KB (QD=1) :     1.254 MB/s [   306.1 IOPS]

  Random Read 4KB (QD=32) :     1.398 MB/s [   341.2 IOPS]

 Random Write 4KB (QD=32) :     1.283 MB/s [   313.3 IOPS]

 Test : 1000 MB [F: 11.9% (221.6/1863.0 GB)] (x2)

 Date : 2012/07/28 7:27:57

OS : Windows 7 Home Premium Edition SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

CrystalDiskMark 3.0.1 x64 (C) 2007-2010 hiyohiyo

                          Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

          Sequential Read :    84.754 MB/s

         Sequential Write :    82.151 MB/s

        Random Read 512KB :    22.361 MB/s

       Random Write 512KB :    46.352 MB/s

   Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :     0.184 MB/s [    44.9 IOPS]

  Random Write 4KB (QD=1) :     0.816 MB/s [   199.3 IOPS]

  Random Read 4KB (QD=32) :     0.871 MB/s [   212.7 IOPS]

 Random Write 4KB (QD=32) :     0.804 MB/s [   196.3 IOPS]

 Test : 1000 MB [C: 4.4% (81.3/1849.3 GB)] (x2)

 Date : 2012/07/28 7:32:43

   OS : Windows 7 Home Premium Edition SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)

Right, new drives are faster than old drives. Pretty cool, huh? I think it's the additional on-board cache.

I doubt a "spinning drive" could saturate a SATA2-300 port, much less a SATA3-600 port. Therefore, I don't think it matters where you connect them. SSDs are a different story.

CrystalDiskInfo should list the Interface type specs. On an Aurora-R3, only 1 or 2 SATA ports are SATA3-600. The motherboard headers should be a different color. Also, check PDF manuals.

Thanks, Tesla.  The only thing confusing me is the primary drive that came with the system is Barracuda XT, the one I installed isn't the XT, but it's faster.  Just makes me wonder if the primary is not optimized. However I don't know what to check for and do if it can be optimized.

Built a proper speadsheet and really dig-into the specs. You will see why the new one is faster. I bet it's the cache (seen it before). I used to switch drives around for this reason ... but now, using an SSD for boot/OS drive makes more sense (if looking for speed).

Make sure old drive is degragged and none of the SMART data is outta-wack. Remember to check Google.