[wplug] Help with Installing 500GB Western Digital Drive

[Bryan J. Smith]

On Wed, 2007-08-01 at 08:56 -0400, Greg Simkins wrote:
> Thanks Bryan and XQuB1T for the help. The problem turned out to be
> that I had the jumper settings on the WD 500GB SATA drive set wrong.
> Once I enabled OPT1 (pins 5&6 jumpered) for 150 MB/s data speed, the
> drive showed up OK.

Hmmm, while that's a solid "workaround," and you should stick with it,
it's rather sad the drive did not work at 3GHz (~300MBps, UltraDMA mode
7/300MBps), and only 1.5GHz (~150MBps, UltraDMA mode 6/133MBps).  Then
again, this is not unheard of.

In the original specifications, SATA 3GHz was supposed to require
twisted cable.  The 3GHz has since been rebranded (i.e., marketing) as
"SATA-II" and the twisted pair version "SATA-IO" (at least the last time
I checked).

In reality, you will see *0* "real world" difference between UltraDMA
mode 6 and 7.  In fact, most of the difference in most SATA 1.5GHz and
3.0GHz models is the fact that the former often use a stock, parallel
ATA MAC with SATA PHY added, and the latter use a single SATA MAC+PHY
ASIC.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith         Professional, Technical Annoyance
mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org   http://thebs413.blogspot.com
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        Fission Power:  An Inconvenient Solution