Sata2 drives keeps bumping down to sata1 speed

[vuronev]

I just bought a new WD2500ks sata ii drive and plugged it into my mobo along with my current seagate sata 1 drive.

I checked the device manager and I notice that the speed on the WD keeps getting downgraded to sata 1.5gb due to "errors" and if I bump it back up to 3.0gb it will eventually bump itself down again. I dont notice any errors writing or reading from the drive and I'm using the sata cable that came with the drive.

Is the drive just bad or is there something else going on?
My asus a8n-e mobo supports sata ii 3.0gb, so I'm not sure what it wrong. The mobo has the latest bios available and is using the latest chipset drivers from nvidia.

Also, another odd thing is that the drive will show up and work in my system if I used the cable the drive came with, it's one of those that blocks the sata power port so that you have to use an old 4 pin power connector. If I plug the drive in using an sata cable that came with my mobo and plug one of the sata power connectors from my PSU to the drive, I can hear it spinning up but it won't show up in windows or in my bios.

Any ideas? I just got the drive so I can return it and exchange if need be, not sure if I'm just missing something or if the drive is just bad.

 

[Brad]

I know it is of little help to you, but you will never see the 3.0 Gb/sec transfer speed due to the drive being limited by the 7200 RPM spin speed of the platter. The 3.0 Gb/sec is little more than a marketing ploy at this point because I am not even aware of any 10,000 RPM drives that support the 3.0 Gb/sec transfer speed. So don't drive yourself crazy with trying to "fix" this, because you aren't losing any performance.

Just an FYI.

 

[kcnychief]

What are the errors you get when it throttles down to 1.5?

Depending on the error, and how painless the exchange process is - that might be a good place to start. This way you can try to rule out the drive (unless you are so lucky and get TWO bad ones), then you can look at possible motherboard/chipset/bios/controller problems.

 

[Mecham]

I know it is of little help to you, but you will never see the 3.0 Gb/sec transfer speed due to the drive being limited by the 7200 RPM spin speed of the platter. The 3.0 Gb/sec is little more than a marketing ploy at this point because I am not even aware of any 10,000 RPM drives that support the 3.0 Gb/sec transfer speed. So don't drive yourself crazy with trying to "fix" this, because you aren't losing any performance.

Just an FYI.

I just upgraded my HDD to SATA300 as well and I know my board does not support this so I also purchased a None RAID SATA300 controller because I don't want to use RAID at the moment. So there is a cheap solution to this problem by purchasing a PCI SATA300 RAID or None RAID controller for two HDD's. At the moment I could only find one manufacturer who supports SATA300, although I would imagine there are probably more out there, I spent hour’s searching through the Internet and calling various suppliers to get one. scan.co.uk, insight.com, all supply None RAID and RAID SATA300 controllers. These are the ones I would recommend although it is personal choice at the end of the day. I have used Promise in the past and have never encountered any issues with them.

RAID: http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail_eng.asp?segment=RAID%200/1%20HBAs&product_id=136

None RAID HBAs: http://www.promise.com/product/product_detail_eng.asp?segment=Non-RAID%20HBAs&product_id=139

 

[Brad]

Aren't you still limited by the spindle speed?

 

[American Zombie]

If this is Windows XP then it is doing what it was designed to do with drive errors. What you need to do is find the cause of your errors then Windows will stop downgrading the transfer rate.

Windows XP downgrades the Ultra DMA transfer mode after receiving more than six CRC errors. Whenever possible, the operating system will step down one UDMA mode at a time (from UDMA mode 4 to UDMA mode 3, and so on).
If the mini-IDE driver for the device does not support stepping down transfer modes, or if the device is running UDMA mode 0, Windows XP will step down to PIO mode after encountering six or more CRC errors. In this case, a system reboot should restore the original DMA mode settings.
All CRC and timeout errors are logged in the system event log. These types of errors could be caused by improper mounting or improper cabling (for example, 40-pin instead of 80-pin cable). Or such errors could indicate imminent hardware failure, for example, in a hard drive or chipset.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/storage/IDE-DMA.mspx

 

[Mecham]

Aren't you still limited by the spindle speed?

Good question, to be honest I don't know, I do know one thing it's bl**y fast. Boot time has increased to such a rate by the time I push the button and then type in my password the desktop just busts in. Shutdown has increased to just Shutting Down to Off whereas before it felt like it took ages to shut down. File transfer is just stupendeous, example I copied a 1.4Gb file from an external HDD to another and it took 58 sec. Now that's impressive speed. On my other HDD's it took 6 minutes to copy the same file.

So maybe maybe not but it's darn fast.

 

[ming]

As Brad said....
However, with any HDD whether 1.5GB or 3.0GB rating, none with ever offer a sustained data transfer rate of the stated potential. ie. they will never constantly transfer data at 1.5gb/s or 3.0gb/s.