XP - Checking SATA performance

Is there any way in XP to tell if a drive is acting as a SATAI or II?

From what I understand XP just reads from the controller, so it's down to the SATA controller not XP. So it probably depends what kind of utilities you've got on the controller.

Not sure but from what I gather, SATAII isn't necessarily faster than SATA. So if you're wondering why your SATAII drive doesn't seem much/any faster, it could be that you are moving around smallish files, so the difference in speed won't be too noticable. However you should notice a bigger difference when copying larger files (i.e. videos etc) as SATAII has a better sustained data transfer rate.

I'm just guessing at why you're asking, though. Am I barking up the wrong tree?

Well the bus is. However the harddrive speed isn't likely to be, as it's the same drive as the SATA one, and it's read/write speed is much slower than the SATA bandwidth.

As for which hardware you've got in your machine, SIW can tell you everything you want to know, and quite a few things you probably didn't.

SATA2 is currently marketing bollocks, theres no such thing as a specification.

And there never will be. The correct term is SATA/300.

wot flameduck said + RAID should make a big diff if setup correctly (assuming you have more than one disk :p)

Thanks folks. It's not that I'm worried about the performance. The drive is giving pretty much what I expect. Just want to make sure the bus is operating at sataII (whoops! /300) so I get the best performance.