SATA-II drive question

basmic

basmic

basmic

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The time is approaching for me to buy a Hitachi 320gb with 16mb of cache.

Now what's getting me, is I seem to remember you have to disable something on SATA-II drives when running them on SATA-I motherboards such as my own.

Or am I thinking that I need to disable NCQ on the drive as soon I fire it up?
 
Some drives are usually set to SATA1 via a jumper by default. The most you will have to do is change/remove the jumper off the back and your set to go.
 
Had a look on Hitachi's site, and the drive is jumperless.

I just seem to remember having to shove Hitachi's Feature Tool disk in, and turning NCQ off, because my motherboard doesn't support it.

Perhaps I'm just jumping the gun, and can safely leave NCQ on - although I won't receive the benefit of it. :(
 
NCQ shouldn't be a problem. If the chipset doesn't support it then it won't ever send CQ requests to the HDD, which will never have to respond to them.

Nearly all drives these days are auto-negotiating, very few require jumpers to run at 1.5Gbps mode.
 
basmic said:
Had a look on Hitachi's site, and the drive is jumperless.

I just seem to remember having to shove Hitachi's Feature Tool disk in, and turning NCQ off, because my motherboard doesn't support it.

Perhaps I'm just jumping the gun, and can safely leave NCQ on - although I won't receive the benefit of it. :(
Click to expand...

You are correct basmic, you need to change the transfer rate via the Feature Tool. :)

"The latest generation of Vancouvers and Kurofunes uses Serial ATA II 3 Gbit/s and UltraATA/133. 7K500 and T7K500 drives support Streaming feature set - these commands optimize HDD operations with streaming data (for example, audio/video). It should be noted that while T7K250 SATA drives come set to 1.5 Gbit/s, T7K500 drives come set to 3.0 Gbit/s. Remember that the interface transfer rate (both parallel and serial — for example, for better compatibility with old hosts) can be changed using Hitachi Feature Tool"
 
Might look into getting a SATA-II PCI interface card.

Any good branded ones, or decent chipsets to look out for?
 
Please read the sticky!

There's no such thing as SATA-II, outside the former name of the SATA organisation. All drives will work on all controllers, regardless of whether they support the 3Gb/s interface speed, NCQ, etc. In some circumstances the drive may need to be jumpered to force the 1.5Gb/s interface speed if the controller is an old 1.5Gb/s controller which doesn't support auto speed negotiation. Plus as current drives don't max out a 1.5Gb/s link anyway, you'll see very little benefit from sticking a new controller card in, even if your current controller doesn't support the 3Gb/s interface speed or NCQ. You'd be better off spending that cash on a better drive really.
 
Trippynet said:
Please read the sticky!

There's no such thing as SATA-II, outside the former name of the SATA organisation. All drives will work on all controllers, regardless of whether they support the 3Gb/s interface speed, NCQ, etc. In some circumstances the drive may need to be jumpered to force the 1.5Gb/s interface speed if the controller is an old 1.5Gb/s controller which doesn't support auto speed negotiation. Plus as current drives don't max out a 1.5Gb/s link anyway, you'll see very little benefit from sticking a new controller card in, even if your current controller doesn't support the 3Gb/s interface speed or NCQ. You'd be better off spending that cash on a better drive really.
Click to expand...
I really wanted another controller which could take advantage of NCQ - but it seems they are mostly PCI-E cards.

Although my controller is a SATA-I (1.5GB/s), users have report decent speed increases with their SATA-II controllers when increasing the drives interface speed from 1.5GB/s to 3.0GB/s.
 
basmic said:
I really wanted another controller which could take advantage of NCQ - but it seems they are mostly PCI-E cards.

Although my controller is a SATA-I (1.5GB/s), users have report decent speed increases with their SATA-II controllers when increasing the drives interface speed from 1.5GB/s to 3.0GB/s.
Click to expand...
Who exactly? There shouldn't be more than a 1Mb/s increase (mainly due to the bursting lifting the average slightly). NCQ is known to hinder performance ever so slightly in a single drive system due to the overhead. When in a multi access system you will see the difference though.

I think the main gains people see are from SATA controllers on the PCIe bus as opposed to the PCI bus also. Nothing to do with the features and more to do with the saturation of the bus.
 
smids said:
Who exactly? There shouldn't be more than a 1Mb/s increase (mainly due to the bursting lifting the average slightly). NCQ is known to hinder performance ever so slightly in a single drive system due to the overhead. When in a multi access system you will see the difference though.

I think the main gains people see are from SATA controllers on the PCIe bus as opposed to the PCI bus also. Nothing to do with the features and more to do with the saturation of the bus.
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Reading back, it was the burst rate. :o

But in a way, it could show slight speed increases - because of the data speed between the controller and drive's cache.
 
Don't forget that a PCI card will be limited by the speed of the bus. PCI itself has a maximum theoretical bandwidth of 127MB/s. Hence you'll never see any of the advantage of 3Gb/s SATA without using a PCIe controller. Even then for a single disk, the difference would be akin to shaving maybe a quarter of a second off your PC's boot up time. Negligable in other words. So just bung it onto your onboard 1.5Gb/s controller and it'll work fine. It won't run cripplingly slowly or anything, it'll be fine.
 
Trippynet said:
Please read the sticky!

There's no such thing as SATA-II, outside the former name of the SATA organisation. All drives will work on all controllers, regardless of whether they support the 3Gb/s interface speed, NCQ, etc. In some circumstances the drive may need to be jumpered to force the 1.5Gb/s interface speed if the controller is an old 1.5Gb/s controller which doesn't support auto speed negotiation. Plus as current drives don't max out a 1.5Gb/s link anyway, you'll see very little benefit from sticking a new controller card in, even if your current controller doesn't support the 3Gb/s interface speed or NCQ. You'd be better off spending that cash on a better drive really.
Click to expand...
If you stick a Hitachi Sata2 HDD into a Sata1 Mobo then it wont be recognised, you need to change the drive with f tool.
This is mentioned in another thread when somebody asked why their new HDD isnt recognised in the Bios.
 
No, that depends entirely on the SATA chipset on the motherboard. Most support Auto Speed Negotiation whereby the controller can negotiate a supported speed between the drive and the controller so that everything works. A few controllers don't support this and hence they expect a 1.5Gb/s drive to be connected. If a 3Gb/s drive is connected instead, they lack the capability to be able to tell the drive to run at 1.5Gb/s, hence the drive doesn't work.

This only occurs with a few guilty chipsets which don't support this SATA feature. Some controllers can actually have their firmware updated to enable Auto Speed Negotiation. However, it is wrong to state that all 3Gb/s drives need to be jumpered down/manually configured for 1.5Gb/s in order to work on older controllers. A majority of older boards will work fine without anything being changed on the drive. It's just a few guilty old SATA chipsets which can have issues. Known faulty chipsets include the VIA VT8237 and VT8237R south bridges, and the VIA VT6420 and VT6421L standalone SATA controllers. SiS's 760 and 964 chipsets also initially exhibited this problem, though it can be rectified with an updated SATA controller ROM (this data is according to Wikipedia).

This is mentioned in the sticky :)
 
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All Hitachi drives come set to a 1.5Gb/s interface speed anyway I believe. With any other drives, it's often a case of trying them and if nothing shows up, just enabling the jumper to force the drive to 1.5Gb/s. Either way, it's certainly not worth buying a PCI SATA 3Gb/s card :)
 
Trippynet said:
All Hitachi drives come set to a 1.5Gb/s interface speed anyway I believe. With any other drives, it's often a case of trying them and if nothing shows up, just enabling the jumper to force the drive to 1.5Gb/s. Either way, it's certainly not worth buying a PCI SATA 3Gb/s card :)
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I think the Deskstar T7K500 series come set to SATA2 speed, hence people not getting issues with the Bios not recognising them.
 
Please stop saying SATA2 - there's no such thing! But point taken about the drives. I was just going on what others have previously said about Hitachi's drives.
 
Trippynet said:
Please stop saying SATA2 - there's no such thing! But point taken about the drives. I was just going on what others have previously said about Hitachi's drives.
Click to expand...

SATA2 SATA2 SATA2 SATA2 SATA2 SATA2 SATA2 SATA2 SATA2 SATA2

Maybe not the right name but its what everybody knows it as.
 
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