More SATA problems

Plasmoid

Plasmoid

Plasmoid

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Joined
8 Sep 2005
Posts
303
Location
Leixlip, Ireland
About a month ago i bought a Maxtor Diamonmax sata b-grade from here and it didnt work for me. I chalked it down to it being a dodgy hd to begin with and just returned it, but now a brand new Seagate Barracuda is not working on me and im stumped for whats wrong.

My thread explaining what happened with the maxtor is here http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17569147

Basically it was working at first and then it went a little haywire, and i suspect it somehow fried my 20gb hard drive as they were on the same power cable. The maxtor was dead but the pata just kept alarming and stopping the pc from booting.

My new 7200.10 320gb Sata arrived today, so i hooked it up on a seperate power cable but i got nothing. It wasent detected in the bios, or in windows or even in the Seatools diagnostic bootdisk. So i changed sata cables and sata ports on my nforce4 motherboard, and tried using a different sata power adapter (my psu uses an adaptor to add in sata power cables) and on a different cable from the psu.

As far as i can tell the hard drive is spinning up fine, it's generating a heck of a lot of heat compared tomy other drives anyway but nothing is detecting it. What im wondering now is if its possible that all my SATA ports are fried or something like that. Has anyone had problems like this or does anyone have any ideas that i can try bearing in mind i dont have another sata pc to test it in at hand?
 
The drive should work when plugged into the nF4 port (definitely not a compatibility thing as my new 320GB Seagate arrived today also and it working fine from the port). Make sure though (if you say the drive is spinning up) that RAID is NOT enabled on the drive. This will be listed under Integrated Peripherals > RAID config or similar. If this is enabled, this is a possible reason why the drive isn't showing.

What motherboard do you have? Have you tried removing the small jumper from next to the SATA port to enable 300MB/s transfer rate?
 
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Hmm I'm baffled then. Usually these are caused by RAID being enabled on the new drive but if this is not the case, the drive may well be faulty / your motherboard is given the fact that a previous SATA didn't work. One last thing, have you made sure all the SATA ports are enabled in BIOS?
 
Yeah i made it my business to reset the bios before give this hd a try, and i double checked.

I had originally got an AN8 ultra but the USB ports fried themselves and everything connected to them and i rma'd it and got an sli back, so im seriously suspecting that all the SATA ports are blown. That being said, the courier nearly dropped the whole box on the way in this morning... wish i had a pc to test.

Any suggestions as regards a cheap SATA controller card?... as i know nothing about them
 
Well do you want a PCI-Express card or a PCI card? I have a PCI Express RAID card based on the SiI3132 chipset (a very decent little card). It has RAID0, RAID1 by default and can operate for a single disk but if you have no PCI express slots free (PCIe x1 or above required as the card is x1). Unfortunately it only has 2 ports.

A PCI card would do just fine for storage but I wouldn't recommend a RAID0 on a PCI card (bandwidth limited heavily on the PCI bus) but you can get a decent 4 port card which would be much cheaper than a 4 port PCIe card.

In honesty, you might as well just get a PCI card as it will be cheaper for a larger card (i.e. one with more ports). As for recommendations, it's not so much as to brand but chipset. A decent Silicon Image chipset like the SiI3114 or SiI3112 would be good.

Having said this, you probably don't even need a RAID card so just a simple SATA controller might do - I'm not great with recommendations as I don't like to recommend something I haven't tried myself.
 
Well... my motherboard is still under warranty but i would have to return to a "certain norewegian etailer" who took over a month to return the last dodgy motherboard. Incidentally we arent on talking terms anymore.

Im thinking i need something to tide me over until the new year and while i have a PCI-E port free i dont see any PCI-E based Sata cards going for less then the cost of a new motherboard. I would like to know which of the Sata cards for under £70 is the best. I probably wont run more then one hard drive off it, and definitly not RAID... im a cheap skate.
 
I'm new to all this SATA lark but (and I know this sounds too simple to be a real option for this problem), but...

Are both the motherboard and drive SATA-I or SATA-II?

I had to jumper my latest HDD which was SATA-II to run as a SATA-I drive as my mobo is only SATA-I.

I think this is too obvious really, but it might be something that is so obvious it's been overlooked!
 
GrahamN said:
I'm new to all this SATA lark but (and I know this sounds too simple to be a real option for this problem), but...

Are both the motherboard and drive SATA-I or SATA-II?

I had to jumper my latest HDD which was SATA-II to run as a SATA-I drive as my mobo is only SATA-I.

I think this is too obvious really, but it might be something that is so obvious it's been overlooked!
Click to expand...
It's an nF4 mobo, so yes it is SATA-II.
 
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