A8N-SLI SATA II Problems

[Solema]

I am hoping someone can help me here. I just purchased two Hitachi 7K80 SATA-II drives and I cannot get the BIOS or Windows XP to recognize them as SATA-II! They come up as SATA-1, but NCQ still works. I know for a fact that these drives are SATA-II. Is there a special SATA-II cable I need to use with these drives or certain things I need to enable in the BIOS? Someone help!

 

[imported_Kensai]

I believe that the SATA2 spec dictates latching connectors.

 

[Solema]

Actually, I figured it out. The Hitachi 7K80 drive comes from the manufacturer running in SATA-I mode. I needed to use a boot tool called Hitachi Feature Tool to change the drive to SATA-II. Hitachi said they did it that way so that people wouldn't damage the drive or their system trying to use it in SATA-II on a SATA-I system. All is working well, and these things are damn fast! Windows boots in less than 15 seconds now.

 

[akugami]

For the most part SATA 1 works just as fast as SATA 2. Go figure. Guess the manufactorers should stop releasing upgrades to the infrastructure and actually upgrading the speed of the drives themselves.

 

[Solema]

Yeah, for the most part sustained write and read speeds are about the same as two Raptors in RAID-0, but the burst read speeds are 425MB/s and burst write of 369MB/s, so I am thrilled with that!