For anyone interested I was correct - Dell hobble their SATA 6GBPs drives down to 3GBPS and have done since 2009. Apparently it was a deliberate policy as they had issues with some servers back then using SATA III specs - but its idiotic to keep this policy over 5 years later. So no 12th generation server - e.g. T320 - ships with 6GBPs SATA drives despite the fact that the exact 'same' drive model purchased as say OEM Seagate ES.3 runs happily at 6GBPs. Dell simply artificially degrade the performance in their firmware. With 13th gen servers there is now a *choice* of SATA speeds - but why?, why even still supply SATA II drives in a new server?? - at least I now know what the issue is.  T620 showing Dell disk running at 3GBPs: [IMAGE]
Hi, I have a week old T320 with H310 RAID controller shipped with 2x 1TB SATA hot swap drives (Constellation ES.3 - Dell part: 0T4XXN, Seagate ST100NM0033). The max sync rate - as reported in the H310 BIOS and in the Lifecycle controller is 3Gbps. The H310 RAID card is a 6GBPs card that's been out for a few years and these SATA drives are 6Gbps (according to the Seagate spec sheet)  I spoke to Dell 'support' and they said they there was no speed specified in their documentation of the drive so they didn't know(!?). Does Dell actually still ship 3GBPs drives - i.e. special degraded firmware? They suggested I speak to sales to change the disks which I will - but for what? SAS would be a cost option for sure and if 'support' don't know the spec of their own parts what are sales going to do.  Any ideas?
PowerEdge T320 SATA sync speed only 3GBPs