Hi, I've got a 250GB Maxtor diamondmax 10 7200RPM, 16MB cache, Sata II... Now, its working fine, i installed windows on it and that also works fine but i'm a bit worried about its performance... Windows doesn't boot up that fast and i just ran the Read Speed Test in Device mannager and it gave me a Burst speed of 165MB/s and a sustained speed of just 68MB/s... Now i know Sata-II allmost never really does true 300MB/s but i think mine is a bit slow... So is this the proper speed i should be getting? or is it to0 slow for a Sata-II? Oh by the way, my mobo is a Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe with latest bios (1303) Thanks.

You're fine. "If it ain't broke, upgrade anyway."

A PATA drive, a SATA-1 drive and a SATA-2 drive are all the same - just with different interfaces. There are no noticable speed differeneces between same model drives on different interfaces. Think of the interface as the number of lanes on a highway and your hard drive as your car. If more lanes are added to the highway to allow more traffic (i.e. data) that does not make your car capable of a higher maximum speed. It does help if you had slow performance due to bottlenecks such as you could get with 2 drives on the same PATA channel. So, as tropic stated, your speed is normal. Michael J