SATA problem, failure or incompatibility?

[mirado.kelly]

I purchased a Western Digital 250G SATA II HDD today (WD2500KS)
My motherboard is Asus P5VDC-MX, acording to Asus web site my motherboard suports SATA 3G, and to my knowledge this the the same as SATA II and should work?

I followed the instalation instructions from Western digital, Connected the cable, and the molex makeing sure not to use both power conectors. I use the tools from WD for instalation of a new drive, but its a no go. As soon as I boot, BIOS seems to be haveing a rough time detecting the SATA drive, it takes quite a while then finaly detects it as an IDE. Though it would not show up in the list of drives for the Data Lifeguard Tools. It apears to be invisible so I cannot formate or partiton it.

Help, what should I do to further Tshoot this problem, I do not have another machine with SATA connectors I can test the drive on.

[morganlefay]

You may want to see if you can get a BIOS update....

I had some old machines that could recognize larger drives.....or they would recognize them..but only 4 gigs

So I am thinking...an updated BIOS may be needed

MLF

[mirado.kelly]

I did a test, enabled 150 mode useing opt1 jumpered 5 + 6 pins, and that seems to have done the trick, but why, my system suposed to suport 3G

I checked asus for bios updates, there are a few to fix temp sensors and fan speed adjustments, no mention of SATA.

Power sometimes cuts out here, I guess I could use the bios Anti crash thing or something but im always woryed when it comes to bios flashing, any thoughts...

[nihil]

Hi Mirado, I do recall that SATA drives were a little temperamental to set up in the early days.

Please remember that just because a device is supposed to "support" something does not mean that it is the factory default setting. You may well have to do a bit of "tweaking" particularly when you are mixing old and new.

Please have a good look at your MoBo and HDD setup instructions, there might be something that you have missed.

Basically, your board comes with 4 SATA/300 ports, so you should be able to plug in a SATA/300 or SATA/150 drive and be good to go. This is because SATA/300 supports "SATA speed negotiation" (please check if there is a setting for that) and is backwards compatible.

What you have done is what I would expect to have to do to get a SATA/300 drive to work on some SATA/150 systems so it is the wrong way round???????????

Just a passing thought.................is this the only HDD on the system? If you already have a SATA/150 drive in there, then I can possibly understand what is happening................. the system cannot handle two different speeds and wants to default to the slowest.

Good Luck

[mirado.kelly]

I noticed there is a jumper option to enable SSC Spread Spectrum clocking on the HDD. Is this safe to enable and should I give it a try?

I have read both the motherboard manual and the hard drive manual. The BIOS has an option

Serial ATA contoller: Disabled, SATA, RAID

I set it for SATA since this is the only SATA drive in my system. When i set for RAID I get a hardware initialize failed. I also have a Maxtor PATA 40G drive on primary ide channel as master, which I disconected for tshooting. I found that after disconecting the PATA it had no effect.

The manual states the mobo supports SATA II through the Via VT8251 RAID Controller and that it suports up to 300MB/s transfer rate.

The mobo manual seems very useless, ive read it a few times over to make sure I am not missing any fine details. The SATA drive came without a manual, only in a completly sealed anti-static bag. I know it wasnt re sealed because there was no opening or tape, the top of the bag had holes on either side that you rip across. I got the manual for SATA drive instalations and jumper settings from Western Digitals web site.

Drive shiped with a jumper block but no jumpers installed, acording to jumper config this means ssc is disabled by default unless I install a jumper between pins 1 and 2.

[nebulus200]

You might check if there are different connectors for each controller on your MB. I have 1 SATA raid controller (and connector) and 1 SATA non-raid controller (and connector)...you might have to switch those to use the appropriate controller. And I also agree about updating your BIOS, I've seen that fix many bizarre problems with several things, including the SATA controllers.

[mohaughn]

Mirado- First off a SATA drive is an IDE drive. Both PATA and SATA drives are IDE drives, but many people mistakingly believe that PATA drives are the only IDE drivers. So the motherboard detecting it as an IDE drive is what it should do, as it is an IDE drive.



SATA 3G is the actual name of the new specification. SATA II is the previous name of the SATA standards organizations. Many devices that are labeled as SATA II may support 3gb/sec but may not fully support the SATA 3g specification. Specifically the device that you bought does not support SATA NCG(native command queueing). Not saying that this is why you are having problems as realistically it should work and you should not need to slow the harddrive down to SATA150 speeds. But it is possible that your motherboard is looking for a fully SATA 3g compliant device, which that harddrive is not.

http://www.storagereview.com/article...D2500KS_1.html

Try posting in the asus help forums. I've always found them to be very helpful and you will find more hardware experts over there than on here.

[mirado.kelly]

Thanks for pointing out this NCQ incompatibility issue with the drive. I have contacted tech support where I brought the drive and am awaiting an email responce. Meanwhile have have been trying to use Asus update utility to download a new bios file, so far it has been unsuccessfull.

I will keep everyone updated. Thanks.

[mirado.kelly]

The update is I got a responce a week later from WD, they claim that my motherboard is not SATA II compliant. Ill just live with the 150 mode, my goals for buying a new hard drive were met and the drive functions just not the mode I thought.

My goals for buying a new drive was size, 40G is not enough for a computer geek, Cable size, those ribon cables are too fat, and something faster then what I had. So all those needs were met and besides the 150 limitation im happy.

Though Id have a tendancy not to go with WD in the future.