F1 on Sata 1

Mr-White · 14 Feb 2009 at 16:40

i'm looking at boosting the power of my 2nd machine which is a Shuttle SK43G. Along with the gfx and memory i want to change the 80gb PATA drive which to be fair sounds like it's about to die anyway as it's constantly reading.

i installed a 250gb WD a few days ago to test and instantly noticed a performance difference even at only SATA 1 but i heard somewhere that the Samsung F1s had issues when running at SATA 1. is this still the case or have they now fixed it ?

MW

ChrisLX200 · 14 Feb 2009 at 18:07

Not heard of any issues other than the fact you have to patch the firmware to make it run at 1.5Gb/sec (rather than using a jumper, or having it auto-detect - so it's a bit less convenient).

Mr-White · 14 Feb 2009 at 18:44

ChrisLX200 said:
Not heard of any issues other than the fact you have to patch the firmware to make it run at 1.5Gb/sec (rather than using a jumper, or having it auto-detect - so it's a bit less convenient).

that might be what i heard about, can't seem to find anything about it though. Does this still affect new drives ?

MW

ChrisLX200 · 14 Feb 2009 at 19:33

Mr-White said:
that might be what i heard about, can't seem to find anything about it though. Does this still affect new drives ?

MW

Yes, new drives are all SATA II by default these days, you need to run the patch program to set it back to SATA I

Mr-White · 17 Feb 2009 at 13:46

ChrisLX200 said:
Yes, new drives are all SATA II by default these days, you need to run the patch program to set it back to SATA I

thanks, where can i find this patch ?

MW

rpstewart · 17 Feb 2009 at 14:20

It's on the Samsung website somewhere but you'll need to go to the US site, the UK version denies all knowledge of Samsung producing HDDs :confused:

You'll also need a machine which will recognise the F1 to allow you to run the firmware patch - ie something that's SATA300 capable. It's a bit catch 22 really, if your machine needs the firmware patch then you can't use that machine to apply it....

ChrisLX200 · 17 Feb 2009 at 14:52

Mr-White said:
thanks, where can i find this patch ?

MW

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/faqView.do?b2b_bbs_msg_id=126&orderNum=5

As above, the drive won't show in the motherboard BIOS, however the patch is 'supposed' to bypass the BIOS and address the hardware directly, seem it doesn't always work. Maybe it can only see drives attached to the first SATA port, or maybe doesn't look any further.

Save yourself some grief and get a WD drive which have jumpers on the back to set the max speed directly.