SATA-II motherboard and drives but only connected at SATA-I

hard drivemotherboardoptical-drivesatassd

I have an Abit AB9 QuadGT motherboard which has a SATA-II controller.

Connected to it I have a Kingston SSDNow V Series 64GB as boot drive and a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 as a data drive. I also have 2 x Optiarc AD-7170S DVD burners attached by SATA.

Both SSD and HDD are SATA-II and the optical drives are SATA-I.

I have just run CrystalDiskInfo and this is reporting that both SSD and HDD are the SSD is connected at SATA-I (1.5 Gbps), not SATA-II (3.0 Gbps).

I have the BIOS set up to use SATA drives in IDE mode.

So a few questions:

  1. Is CrystalDiskInfo reporting correctly? – yes it is!

  2. Are the optical drives causing the SSD & HDD to connect at the slower rate? – no they are not!

  3. Is there any setting or jumper to force the SSD & HDD to use SATA-II?

I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate.

EDIT: More info: I have now run CrystalDiskInfo on my Media Centre PC and it is reporting the same model Kingston SSD as SATA-I but the data drive WD Caviar Green correctly as SATA-II

EDIT2: Thanks to Michael Steele – I now have a SATA-II mode data HDD! Now it's just the SSDs to sort out

EDIT3: See my answer below – the SSD is supposed to be in SATA-I mode.

Best Answer

Seagate Barracuda 7200.10

There is a jumper block on the back of the drive next to the power and data connections. By default, a jumper is set to limit the drive to SATA-I speeds.

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