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Originally Posted by Eazy
Last week I bought the Hitachi SATA II 250GB T7K250 HDD for 4650/- from Prime ABGB at Lamington Road. This has NCQ and it is running on my old ASUS P4 board as a SATA I drive at the moment without any problems. Dont know about the location of service centre but I would give it to Prime in case of a problem.
The SATA II drives seem to be supplied set as SATA I to avoid problems with running them as SATA II on a SATA I controller.
To set the Hitachi drive to run as SATA II you have to make this change with Hitachi's software "Hitachi Feature Tools" which can be downloaded from......
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm
WARNING IN HITACHI's DOWNLOAD PAGE......
Warning!: Switching your drive to support 3.0Gb/s, or enabling spread spectrum clocking and then using it, may render your drive unusable in a system that can't support these functions. |
It was about 6 months back that I bought my Hitachi 80 GB SATA II HDD. When used, it was shown as SATA I and when I searched their web site, it was known that the disks are shipped as SATA I due to compatibility problems and that it could be upgraded to SATA II by using the tool mentioned above. I dounloaded the Feature Tool and the Manual and I came to know that to use it I need a FDD. Having abandoned the FDD long back, I did not want to fit it in my new system. Today when I happened to visit their site again, there was a CD Image of the same SW. So I downloaded it and upgraded the disc successfully to SATA II using it. When rebooted, NCQ also became enabled.
When I tested the drive speed it was
Theoretical Limit -300 MBPS
Sustained Speed -60 MBPS
Previously it was
Theoretical Limit -150 MBPS
Sustained Speed -60 MBPS
So it seems that for practical reasons, it is of absolutely no use! We can only boast of 3GBPS.