Poor SATA HDD performance with ASUS P5B

[brianford]

I recently installed an ASUS P5B board with a Core2Duo E4300 overclocked to 2.4GHz. The system is stable and cool and I am very happy with the performance with the exception of the SATA HDDs. I have 3 recycled SATA 150 HDDs (Hitachi, WD, and Maxtor), including my system drive, and Sandra says that all 3 perform much more poorly than typical PATA drives. Sandra also gives the warning for all three that "Current mode not optimal. Check settings." The controller properties in device manager indicates all three are in Ultra DMA 5. The BIOS settings are all set to AUTO but the information given in the BIOS setup appears to be correct for the drives so I assumed AUTO to be fine. I have the latest BIOS rev. and all of my drivers are up to date as far as I can tell. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

system overview:
Windows XP Pro SP2
ASUS P5B mainboard
Core 2 Duo E4300 (overclocked to 2.4GHz)
4GB DDR2-800 (running at 800, Dual Channel mode, remapping off so 3GB indicated in BIOS and Windows)
Maxtor 6L300S0 SATA 150 system drive (16MB cache, 7200rpm etc.)
eVGA GeForce 6200 LE PCI-E x16 display adapter (256 +256 MB)

[SRTDodge05]

Well first off SATA drives arent much faster then pata if any. Try this program to see what yours read and write average is.
HdTach

[Anarchi]

True, SATA is not faster than PATA, except for the new Raptors perhaps?

Anyway what are the model numbers of those recycled HDD's?

Older HDD's have slower technology and cannot match the speed of the latest PATA drives.

ps. If those Recycled HDD's are actually "Refurbished" HDD's, dont trust them. A high percentage of refurb HDD's fail within the first year, so dont trust your data on them.