I upgraded a Dell T3600 computer with a 500Gb hard drive to a Samsung 850 500Gb SSD.  After install, I noticed the disk throughput and IOPS wasn’t performing as I had hoped.  I was seeing SATA 2 performance levels.

The Dell T3600 Workstation lists that it has only SATA 1 (1.5Gbps) and 2 (3.0Gbps) ports per the service manual.  This puts a damper on things when upgrading to a SSD drive.

But, this isn’t entirely correct.  It seems that the ports labeled SATA0 and SATA1 are actually SATA 3 level ports whereas HDD0 (which is where the old 500Gb hard drive was originally attached), HDD1, HDD2, and HDD3 are all SATA 2 ports.

By moving the SATA cable to the unused SATA1 connector (SATA0 was in use by the DVD drive), I was able to see quite an improvement in performance:

The comparison really shows the difference:

Moral of the story, don’t believe everything you read… 🙂