I have a GA-Z77-DS3H motherboard which has two SATA-III sockets and 4 SATA-II sockets. I have two hard drives, one running OS X the other running Windows 8. The OS X drive works perfectly at full SATA-III speeds. The windows 8 drive however which is a Seagate ST3500312CS SATA-II, appears to be stuck in SATA-I mode despite the jumper on the back being removed as per Seagates tech docs. I have tried moving it to a different SATA port, running it without the OS X drive attached, different cables and in both IDE and AHCI mode. My mobo is a rev 1.0 updated to the latest bios firmware. There appear to be no settings which enable a throttle. A lot of people have told me that a mechanical drive will never saturate a SATA-I connection so it doesn't really matter but I beg to differ (and if that's true then what is the point of SATA-II and III?). Disk speed performance is piss poor and the drive kicks out a meagre 3.7 on the windows index score which is a clear indication that something isn't right. Both OS X and Windows report the 1.5GBps link speed so it's not a driver issue. Does anyone have any idea why this might be happening? I only use my Windows drive for gaming and slow disk accessing isn't helping. EDIT: I have Googled the shit out of this issue but have had no suggestions beyond the jumper settings, it's a tricky thing to search for.
It's the only spare drive I have and after days of setting up windows and installing countless gb's of games n stuff (mostly over a crap internet connection) I'd hate to have to start again.
Start with basics. Change cable How many ports on mb ate 3gb/s or 6gb/s? Is there a firmware update Can you just force correct speed in bios.
1. Tried it. 2. 2xSata-III 4xSata-II (tried the drive in each port) 3. For the Mobo - yes, done. For the HDD...no. 4. No.
There is a reason why it is negotiating at 1.5Gbps. This is usually because the disk is being read wrong by the mobo. This is why i asked if you had any other drives around as you might to see if they can be read correctly. A bad cable can do this also along with dirty connections, etc...
Not a solution as such but a question: Does your drive actually need more than 1.5GB link, can it cap that speed really?
Well from what I've been told, probably not. But it feels slow. I've tried hard to separate my imagination from the whole affair but disk performance in Windows 8 is just atrociously and noticeably bad and I can't think of any other reason other than this SATA issue. Even if it's not hitting performance, it'll still bug me forever until I figure out why it's happening. I only ever fire up Windows for gaming, but it's a long drawn out affair I tells ya!
I've seen a lot of so called SATA 2 HDDs working at 1.5GB. Maybe it was an issue while the technolgy was transitioning that was never fixed. I think they lied...
