I have a WDC WD2000FYYZ-01UL1B1 (SATA III 6GB) running on an older mainboard with Nvidia nforce 650i SLI / nforce 430i with 4 SATA II ports. The pysical layer speed negotiated ist just 1.5 GB (SMART reports: SATA Version is: SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 1.5 Gb/s). It works so far, I randomnly see some NCQ problems in system logs so I wanted to try to force the WD drive to SATA 2.0 and see if this improves things / connection speed. That’s just for some background information, I am still investigating that.
So two questions for now:
“Older” WD drives like the WD2003FYYS RE4 2TB having 4 jumpers that can be set, jumpered pins 5&6 enables “PHY 1.5 GB” on that drive.
The WDC WD2000FYYZ-01UL1B1 has still the pins, but no information on the disk label (I found on WD helppages: “Your drive’s label will show the exact jumper settings your drive supports.”). → So does my drive still support PHY (in my case to SATA 2.0 3.0 GB/s) by jumpered pin 5&6?
If above answer is “yes” - can I just jumper it without corrupting / loosing data (the disk was in use and has OS / data files on it)?
Thank you! Yes this worked - disk is now connecting with negotiated SATA 2 (3 GB/s) to controller!
P.S: this also improved speed by 30% on benchmarks, but I just ran into more troubles in SATA 2 mode, having had in SATA 1 / 1.5 GB/s sometimes UDMA_CRC_Errors when NCQ was enabled (disabling NCQ resolved it), it now has hard freezes for seconds etc. So I reverted back to 1.5 GBs :((
Seems the WDC WD2000FYYZ is kind of a diva at least with my older Nvidia SATA chipset; the previously used Samsung HDD did work fine in SATA 2 mode. Also tried different cables and ports before. I seen a buyers review on Amazon stating issues when it is not used on a SATA 3 controller. Well, I will try to analyse and collect more data and open another thread later.