Hard Drive trouble, help needed please

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

I’ve just recently purchased a WD Caviar Blue SATA 3 internal hard drive for my PC (AMD athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+) as my old internal HD failed on me (had it for around 6 years). I plugged in the new WD HD but the Bios does not recognize it. I can hear it spinning up so the power cable works, I have tried two different sets of SATA cables on all 4 ports on the motherboard, tried to vary the odd jumper settings after having none for the first few trys but no luck. I don’t have another PC using SATA to try it out on however I do have 2 old HD’s which I have tried and they register as the Master and slave IDE. The slave wont load because its so old it has no memory (used Windows 95 on it) and my master IDE seems to get stuck on loading up Windows ME and I can only access it on safe mode so I can’t look in the add hardware section of the control panel in safe mode.

I have thought about wiping my master IDE and putting Windows XP on it but I’d like to avoid that if possible. Any suggestions on what else to test, jumper settings, cables etc would be appreciated? Thanks

2

Hi what motherboard does it have and what sata controller, sata 1.5 gbs or sata 3gbs. If it has sata 1.5 gbs you will never get a sata 3 drive to work.

3

Thank you for the reply Hammey.

I’m using an ASUS A8N-E motherboard and from the ASUS website, it does mention it has 4 x SATA 3Gb/s so that shouldn’t be the problem. I’m wondering if the motherboard could be the problem but i’m in a situation where I don’t have any PC’s at hand where I can connect my Hard drives up to their sata ports and try them out.

Any other suggestions?

4

Hi well older sata controllers like via and nForce can have problems with new sata 3 drives. A via I have would not recognise a blue drive, but it found a 1 tb of the competitions drives it was sata 2 to sata 1 . Only thing to try really is the drive in a newer pc.

5

Thanks for the advice Hammey, I think I’ll have to buy myself a SATA2 hard drive and see if that works. May go for the WD  caviar green 500GB, any idea if that’s a good reliable hard drive?

If not I’ll just have to buy myself an up-to-date PC if push comes to shove.

6

Hi the green drives are not really ment to use as a boot drive they are ment for a storage drive. The WD black series is good and has a 5 year warranty.

7

http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/AMD_Socket_939/A8NE/

That motherboard has a pair of PCI-E 1.0 x1 slots,

and this Highpoint RocketRAID 620 works for us

in an Intel motherboard from that same era:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115075&Tpk=highpoint%20rocketraid%20620

We wired a new 6G WD2500HHTZ VelociRaptor to that controller,

and measured about 189 MB/second.

An x1 PCI-E 1.0 slot has an upstream bandwidth of 250 MB/second,

so the RocketRAID 620 is a good solution to consider

and that add-on controller is only $40 at Newegg (see above).

Caution:  read your motherboard manual, because some older

x1 slots are disabled if other PCI-E slots are populated.

Update:  I just noticed that you also have one x4 PCI-E slot: 

the black slot labeled “1 x PCIe x4” in the ASUS specs:

and the Highpoint RocketRAID models 640 and 640L

will work in that slot, and also provide you with more

upstream bandwidth (NOT 4X, however;  see below):

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115077&Tpk=Rocketraid%20640

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115118&Tpk=HighPoint%20RocketRAID%20640L

Bear in mind, however, that the on-board chip logic limits

the upstream bandwidth to x2 PCI-E 1.0 lanes,

or 2 x 250 = 500 MB/second in one direction.

This is true, EVEN THOUGH the edge connector is x4.

The regular download page for the 640L does not

list any drivers for XP, but we browsed Highpoint’s website

and found a “buried” page that lists 640L drivers that

are designed for XP.

We installed our RocketRAID 620 in an Intel model D915GAG motherboard

(approximately the same vintage as your motherboard).

Hope this helps.

MRFS

8

We also have both Highpoint RocketRAID models 2640x1 and 2640x4

running fine in similar Intel motherboards i.e. D915PGN and D915GAV:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115053&Tpk=N82E16816115053
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816115094&Tpk=N82E16816115094

The latter ports only run at 3G, but they do support SAS devices too,

and they come with cables that have  the required SAS connectors:

a SAS “male” on a SAS storage device combines the

power and data connectors into one solid “block” or “key way”:

This is designed to prevent a SAS device from plugging

into a SATA backplane, whereas a SATA device can still

plug into a SAS backplane.

MRFS