I just bought (2) 1TB Caviar Black drives today, and in my bios they are showing up as SATA I drives… this system has 6 HD installed and all the others (Two Seagate Barracuda 750GB SATA II, One Seagate Barracuda 2TB SATA II and One WD 250GB SATA II) all the HD’s are seen as SATA II except for the new WD Blacks.
MB is a Gigabyte GA-790FXTA-UD5 (Bios F3j) with an AMD Phenom II X6 1090T. The New drives are connected to Ports 0 and 1.
I’ve read that a jumper should be connected to pins 5 and 6 to disable SATA III, but my drives didn’t come with any jumbers, but I’ve found other posts that they were not necessary, I found other posts that a firmware update was required.
anyone have any suggestions?
Vin
EDIT: I found some jumpers from an old MB, put them in shorting pins 5/6 and there was no change, still SATA I. I’ve tried different cables, and also different ports. these drives are staying SATA I.
I have a similar drive, WD1002FAEX-00Y9A0, with the same problem. I have a Nforce chipset, but the exact same problem. Randomly it boots up on SATA gen2, but 90% of the time it boots as SATA gen1.
What i found is that the drive firmware and the bios on the motherboard have a problem communicating their connection speed. By default , de drive should work at SATA3 speed but since the board does not support it , then it should work at SATA2; the problem is that it won’t do that all the time because of the speed negociating protocol for SATA devices.
A new firmware with a fixed protocol should do the trick , if WD will ever make a new one.
A fix could be to have a program with which we could force our drives to work only as SATA2 devices not let them negociate the speed automatically.
