Difficulty enabling SATA-II in Windows XP

[BOOMboom-GIRL]

I recently purchased a 74GB WD Raptor and installed XP Professional on it with an EVGA nForce4 SLI motherboard. When I go into systems, device manager, and my SATA device, it shows my hard drive as SATA Generation I, 1.5Mb transfer.

Are the Raptor's not SATA II capable w/ 3.0Mb transfer rates? Is there a step to enable SATA II via Windows? I installed XP onto this drive without using the RAID driver disks that came with the motherboard as I was not running RAID. Do I need to reinstall using the floppy drivers in order to enable SATA II?

Thanks!

[defakto]

Raptors are not SATA II drives.

[E4g1e]

I recently purchased a 74GB WD Raptor and installed XP Professional on it with an EVGA nForce4 SLI motherboard. When I go into systems, device manager, and my SATA device, it shows my hard drive as SATA Generation I, 1.5Mb transfer.

Are the Raptor's not SATA II capable w/ 3.0Mb transfer rates? Is there a step to enable SATA II via Windows? I installed XP onto this drive without using the RAID driver disks that came with the motherboard as I was not running RAID. Do I need to reinstall using the floppy drivers in order to enable SATA II?

Thanks!

The current 74GB Raptor, as defakto said, is not an SATA-II (300 MB/s) drive. It is only SATA-I (150 MB/s) compliant.

In addition, SATA-II drives must have a native SATA interface. The 74GB Raptor, on the other hand, actually has a PATA/133 interface that's bridged to SATA operation, disqualifying that drive from SATA-II compliance.

[BOOMboom-GIRL]

OOPs... didn't look closely enough. How about the TCQ commands? Is that automatically on w/ XP and an nForce 4 SLI board? In device manager, I have native command queing checked.

In regards to the SATA II question, I have a Barracuda 7200.7 and I know it is SATA II w/ NCQ. When I go into device manager, it also only shows SATA I, w/ a transfer rate of 1.5 GB/s. Anything I'm missing to turn it on?

Thanks in advance.

[draksia]

Very few sata controllers support TCQ and I believe no chipsets support it.


Also the barracuda 7200.7 is not a SATA II drive. The only SATA II drives right now are Western Digital WD2500KS and the Hitachi T7K250 and 7K80 drives. Seagate doesn't currently have a drive that supports SATA II.

[DougLite]

Very few sata controllers support TCQ and I believe no chipsets support it.


Also the barracuda 7200.7 is not a SATA II drive. The only SATA II drives right now are Western Digital WD2500KS and the Hitachi T7K250 and 7K80 drives. Seagate doesn't currently have a drive that supports SATA II.Bzzzttt!! (Although you are right about TCQ and the 7200.7 not supporting 3 gbps transfer. Some 7200.7's support NCQ, and there are a few more drives out there that support both 3 gbps trnasfer and NCQ. MaxLineIII/DM10 from Maxtor, 7K80/T7K250/7K500 from Hitachi, and Samsung SP P120/P80 JJ. In addition, WD has a mix and match of either 3 gbps or NCQ drives, but bizarrely not both.

[Ultra Wide]

TCQ or NCQ which one?

[DougLite]

TCQ = Raptors, next to no controllers
NCQ = 7200RPM "SATA-II"/SATA-3G/SATA-2.5 drives, supported on newer chipsets and controllers.