SATA drives have jumpers?!

Ok, now forgive me for being a little slow on the uptake but since when have SATA drives had jumpers? A few months back I bought a couple of Seagate Barracuda 500GB drives – I’ve since found out that Seagate bought Maxtor so they’re probably just rebranded Maxtors but that’s just a whole other story in itself. Anyway, the drives I bought were dropped in to my new system build and configured as a RAID 1 mirror.

I’ve recently been having some problems with random system hangs and I’d kind of whittled the issue down to a RAID issue so I bought another identical model Seagate Barracuda which arrived last night. I put it in my machine thinking nothing of it, booted up in to Safe Mode (again, another story as to why the array won’t rebuild itself in Windows) and upon playing around in Intel Matrix Storage Manager while the array rebuilt, I noticed that the new drive I’d put in was showing that the Current Serial ATA Transfer Mode was Generation 2.

Comparing this with the other drive, which was showing Generation 1 I did a bit of investigation and came across a forum post hinting to drive jumpers being set that restricts data transfer speeds to 1.5Gbps… my first thought was “EH?!”

I turned off my PC and opened the hood to discover that the new drive I had was indeed missing the jumper, my old (apparently OK) Hard Drive had the jumper. I managed to remove the jumper using an EXTREMELY small screwdriver and a lot of patience, popped it back in my system and booted up again. My system took HALF the time to boot to Windows logon and a load of the final level in COD4 again took about half the time.

While it’s embarrassing to admit that I didn’t even know about SATA drives having restricter jumpers given my job, WHY on earth are they even on the drives as standard? I’ll get some pictures together once I get home and post them up. To be honest, I should really have looked a little closer at the drive information label stuck to the drive as I’ve just looked at a Samsung SATA here at work and that also has the information printed on the label.

You learn something new every day I guess!