I just built a brand new machine, quad core and all that and decided to put a pair of SATA II Caviar Blue 500’s in it, not in raid I may add, just drive c/e (d being the DVD r/w)
The pair of WD500AAKS drive now show up in my bios as Ultra DMA5 drives with P10 - and they are just SO slow - this is a new machine and last night I done a side by side install on both my old one and this, what took 10 mins or so on my OLD PATA machine took well over 30 mins on this NEW SATA !
On the bios boot screen of this new machine, I’m quickly informed I DO have IDE drives and no SATA, by all accounts they are seen as IDE drives as it launches into Windows.
No one can give me correct instructions on how to set things up and correct this, WD point to ASUS - ASUS point to Microsoft and Microsoft point straight back at both of them and tries to tell me to go WIN 7 64 BIT !
All very well and good BUT the software I use for Pro AV has not reached stability on 64 bit VISTA yet, there’s no way I’m moving from XP Pro 32 bit into all that, that’s for sure.
From what I can make out, this 300mbs thing is just a load of old bull, in the real world, SATA II is lucky to sustain 100mbs.
From other forums I’ve read, I’m led to believe that WD (oem) drives are factory set to SATA 1 (100mbs) in order to be backward compatible- by all accounts there is a Hitachi HAD Utility that can set them to SATA II but it runs in DOS and XP don’t have proper DOS.
If any one else has had FAST results from these drives, I’d love to hear how you set them up, and if any one from WD happens to read this, it would be good to hear from you rather than having my emails referred to Q&A pages.
