How to set W520 mSATA port to SATA 3

I see lots of arguments on the 'net about the W520 having/not having SATA 3 ports, but I'm sure it does.
I ran Samsung Magician the other day to see how my new Samsung drive was performing, and it warned me that it was connected to a SATA/3 interface but was running at SATA/2.
CrystalDiskInfo confirms this and that only 1 of my drives is running at SATA/600. I especially want my Samsung to run at SATA/3.
What do I change to allow all my drives to run at SATA/600?

 

For the W520 & W530, there was a limit to how many SATA devices could run at SATA 3 speeds. And since only 2 SATA devices could run with a SATA 3 connection and there are 3 possible storage locations, Lenovo had to pick and choose which ones would be SATA 3 and which would be SATA 2. In order to change their choice, I think you would need to swap the connection points on the motherboard between the modular bay and the mSATA port.

 

Thank you for your reply!
Do you have any sources for this information? I'd like to research this more and as I said earlier, the 'net is filled with plenty of mis-information about the W520, and even Lenovo themselves don't seem to know what's going on.

Also, as you can see, the indication is that my mSATA port is capable of running at SATA/600 but is "set" to SATA/300 for some reason. If I can only have one port at SATA/600, I want it to be the mSATA drive, but it SEEMS like both the Samsung (mSATA OS drive) and Hitachi (UltraBay drive) can be SATA/600. Dunno what's going on with the Intel (regular internal SATA port), but that doesn't matter as much.

 

Pretty sure the msata on the w530 is SATA3 though I haven't benched it in some time. Also I never noticed much difference between sata2 and sata3

 

I have a W530 and the mSATA is limited to 300 MB/s, whereas the 2.5" drive bay and Ultrabay can go up to 600 MB/s. And if you look at your chipset (Intel QM67) or mine (Intel QM77) in this Wikipedia article, you will see that both are limited to 2 SATA ports running at 6 Gbit/s, but can have up to 4 more SATA ports running at the slower 3 Gbit/s speed. Since Lenovo could only assign high-speed to 2 of the 3 SATA ports on the system, they assigned the high-speed ports to the 2.5" bay and the Ultrabay. In order to get that speed from your mSATA, you would need to essentially trick your motherboard into thinking that was one of the high-speed ports. You may be able to do that by creating a custom BIOS or by physically changing the connection points. I'm not entirely sure.

 

Interesting. Thank you for that reply.

Running CDM on the drive to see what sort of throughput I'm getting (and whether I've maxed out SATA/300) I get these results, which the insanely high Seq numbers I presume are caused by the cache in my SSD? Anyway, would these numbers get any better with SATA/600?

My Samsung 850 (mSATA @ SATA/300):


My Intel 320 (SATA @ ??)


My Hitachi (normal mechanical SATA drive @ SATA/600)

 

You have RAPID mode enabled on your Samsung 850, which essentially benchmarks your RAM instead of your SSD. RAPID mode does not necessarily transfer to better real-world performance, though, according to the reviews I've seen. For real-world performance, benchmark with RAPID mode off. In this case, you've got a SATA 3 SSD in a SATA 2 port. The SSD is going to be limited by the port in this case.

Your Intel 320 is a SATA 2 SSD on a SATA 3 port. So even though the port can accomodate SATA 3 speeds, the SSD cannot.

And your hard drive, like most hard drives, cannot even saturate SATA 1. So even though it's on a SATA 3 port, it can't actually go that fast.

 

Understood about RAPID. I'll turn it off and see what sort of numbers I get. The other drives are fine, their performance is what I expected from older drives.
Seems like my 850 write speeds are about 50% of what they should be, though, so I'll do some more tests.

 

So, with RAPID disabled, my 850 doesn't look so good!

Would the numbers being 50% of what this drive should normally get have anything to do with SATA300 vs 600?

 

You got it. Because the port is 300 MB/s max, it prevents the drive from going faster.

 

Crap. So no known way of switching which ports are SATA/600? Obviously my Hitachi could easily be SATA/300 (or lower) if I can get my mSATA to run at the faster speed.

 

The "mSATA" connector is actually mini-PCI-Express. Is mPCIe have the potential to be a faster interface than mSATA? Are there mPCIe SSDs that are not SATA?

 

There are, but they're in a different form factor (M.2) that your notebook doesn't support. Aside from mSATA SSDs, the only other options for that slot in your notebook are wide area network (cellular) cards.

 

Honestly, I wouldn't worry about it to much. The number that really matters is 4K random read performance, which makes up about 95% of the data access pattern that your computer goes through under typical desktop application, gaming, VM, or database use.

The difference between SATA 2/3 is only in sequential read/write. And the only real world scenario where sequential read/write matters is if you are doing large photo or video editing. And I assume that you aren't doing that.

In real-world scenarios, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference if your SSD is running at SATA 2 or 3. The only time you would ever notice is if you intentionally run a synthetic benchmark that does not reflect real-world usage scenarios.

So I wouldn't worry too much about it. You're not getting any practical benefit. The only benefit youbget by running SATA 3 is to satisfy a personal OCD desire to max out your hardware.


Sent from my XT1575 using Tapatalk

 

Yeah, I've got some of that.
Picked up another EVO at a great Boxing week price and replaced my Intel 320, made it my system drive, and cloned the mSATA system drive to it. Now I have the mSATA as an additional utility/data drive.



My OCD is now satisfied.

Thanks, everyone!