Hi, I have a Toshiba MK3263GSX 320GB/5400RPM 2.5" SATA drive on a dell laptop and it transfers data very slow, making almost unusable the laptop.
With an old 120 giga sata cloned drive, the laptop works well.
Is there a jumper position in this toshiba drive to change from sata II to sata I or something alike?
It has 4 pins in a row, but undocumented. I called toshiba support but they said they can´t help because I didn`t bought them the laptop...

No, and in any case, that would not account for a significant performance problem (the interface speed won't be a significant limiting factor, if at all).

More likely is that there is another problem (e.g. internal read retries being done by the drive, due to an internal problem), which is causing the slowness you are seeing.

It's not clear to me if the 120GB drive which you mention, was cloned from this 320GB drive, or from somewhere else. Are you trying to get the data off the 320GB drive? Or just to find the cause of the slowness, but the data isn't important because you've already got it copied onto the 120GB drive?

[Edited to add: P.S. What's the history of the "slow" 320GB drive? Has it always been in this laptop? Has it been "fast" at some previous time?]

maybe the drive got reduced to PIO due to retries?

See this thread:
slow-toshiba-mk6025gas-t17958.html

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A backup a day keeps DR away.

@Alexii and fzabkar: Thanks, good point, I keep forgetting about that Windows IDE driver behaviour, since the systems which I work on don't do that...

This Windows IDE driver behaviour made sense when using a real parallel ATA interface, since reducing the interface clock rate could allow a parallel interface with poor signal quality to continue working with no (or fewer) apparent errors, although at a slower speed. However when the device at the end is actually a SATA disk (via a SATA controller in IDE compatibility mode), then the actual physical SATA link speed can't be reduced below 1.5Gbps (and I wonder whether an existing 3Gbps link would be renegotiated down to 1.5Gbps anyway). Therefore any attempt by Windows to compensate for what it thinks are interface CRC errors, isn't going to help in such a SATA config, as Windows doesn't have the same ability to slow down the SATA link speed.

What I was attempting to say is that using SATA I interface speed isn't a significant limiting factor - but you've kindly pointed out a different limiting factor which may be occurring.

@walroro: If/when you reply to my questions, the answers will be helpful in guiding other possible advice for you, as would checking the Windows event log for errors (e.g. CRC errors) that would lead to the Windows behaviour which the other members have mentioned. If it was my system, I'd also attempt to use MHDD to get an OS-independent view of the drive I/O speed & basic health.