Acer Travelmate B113-E SATA issue confirmation.

Hi there,
I've been using an Acer Travelmate B113E with a Celeron 1017u for a couple of days and decided to buy and install an 840 Evo SSD in it last night, but after everything was done the software says that it's not running at SATA 3 but instead SATA 2 which I then confirmed using CrystalDiskMark.

There was a previous post more than a year ago on this forum (with no replies) and that user mentioned that the SATA bus is capable of 6Gb/s and by looking at the service manual for the model I can confirm that. So why is the bandwidth only 3Gb/s?

I've updated all the Intel drivers as well as an AHCI driver. The BIOS version is the same (2.21) but the date on the one on the laptop doesn't match the one on the drivers page. I'm more inclined to believe that the driver on the website was put online later rather than there being 2 BIOSs with the exact same version numbers.

So what can be done?

Help and advice will be very much appreciated.

Thanks for reading.

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JackE

The bottleneck interface is likely to be a IC chip hardwired somewhere on the motherboard. The bottleneck you have is similar to that of using 1866 MHz DDR3 with a MB buss interface that can only deliver to the CPU chipset at a rate of 1333MHz. While the 1866MHz RAM works just fine with the 1333MHz MB and with a CPU that might easily handle 1866MHz, both will be limited to the 1333MHz MB interface conduit that connects the two (among ***many*** other things the two must communicate with via the MB).

So, yes, your CPU might be able to easily handle SATA3 drive rates but only if you had a SATA3-rated MB interface between it and the SATA3 drive.

Jack E/NJ

greyem

So basically, nothing can be done.

Thanks for taking the time to help Jack.

JackE

You might check to see if you can get any additional system info for your particular machine by doing an online scan at http://edge.crucial.com/store/listparts.aspx?mfr=Acer&model=TravelMate%20B113-E-2409

The SATA-3 comments therein only pertain to the drive and not necessarily your motherboard. It states that "Data Transfer Rate is the rate at which data can be sent or received. This is determined by your motherboard. A drive with a higher transfer rate will only run at the rate of the motherboard's transfer rate "

It's conceivable that you could find a SATA-3 mainboard that would fit your case. But you're likely not gonna get much of a bang for the bucks you're gonna spend on the upgrade.

Jack E/NJ

greyem

I'll try the scan when I go home but do you think I will find anything different?

I was only ever prepared to spend about £20 (~$30) for a hardware solution to fix the issue and I'm ok with the speed now. I mean, sequential read and writes are 3x faster and 4k random is about 50x faster than the hard drive that came with the laptop.

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