sata question

is there any way of telling if your sata hard drive is running at the speed that it should be?

If your running a Windows XP OS, I know a way how to find if your IDE HDD is running at the speed it's suppose to, I think it's similar for SATA too, never had a SATA so I can lead you to direct spot so you'll have to search a bit.

Control Panel > System > Hardware > Device Manager > IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers > Properties > Primary Channel > Test Speed

So when you go to device manager search where it says SATA or Serial ATA, and it should be similar like for ATA's... I think

One cute utility I sometimes use is the free HD Tach. It has a database of various models, so you can guage a ballpark you should be in. If you post your results, it'll be clear if there's a major problem.