[Wylug-help] Getting a SATA II drive to work as SATA I

[Anne Wilson]

On Thursday 06 Sep 2007, John Hodrien wrote:
> On Thu, 6 Sep 2007, Anne Wilson wrote:
> > I'm clutching at straws, hoping that these error messages mean something
> > to someone.
> >
> > This motherboard only has SATA I, and I can't upgrade just yet.  The
> > drives I have are Hitachi drives, and they have no jumpers.  Hitachi
> > tech. support pointed me to a download page where they offer a CD image
> > and a floppy one. My ancient floppy drive is dodgy so I tried the CD one
> > first.  Unfortunately I had the same problem with both.
>
> I don't suppose the wikipedia provided information is of any use:
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA#Backward_and_forward_compatibility
>
>     "According to the hard drive manufacturer Maxtor, motherboard host
>      controllers using the VIA and SIS chipsets VT8237, VT8237R, VT6420,
>      VT6421L, SIS760, SIS964 found on the ECS 755-A2 which was manufactured
> in 2003, do not support SATA II 300 drives."
>
>     "Users with a SATA-150 motherboard with one of the listed chipsets
> should either buy an ordinary SATA-150 hard disk, buy a SATA-300 hard disk
> with the user-accessible jumper, or buy a PCI or PCI-E card to add full
> SATA II capability and compatibility."

I knew I had only SATA I capability, and I asked around and was told that 
generally there was no problem.  The drives in question I bought from a 
family member who had bought them, then decided he wanted bigger ones.  Until 
I tried to install them I didn't realise that they didn't have the required 
jumper.  (Abit's Tech Support said that they had only ever seen Hitachi 
drives without the jumper, so perhaps it's not surprising that most people 
had found no problem.)

That leaves the possibility of a PCI card - no PCI-E on this motherboard 
either.  If I can't get their software to run I'll have to try to locate one 
of those.  Thanks for pointing that out.

Anne


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