System Specs :
CPU : AMD Athlon 64 3400+
Mobo : MSI K8N Neo Platinum
Chipset : nVidia nForce 3 250Gb
GraCa : ATi Radeon 9250 with 128MB
HD IDE : Maxtor 120GB @ 7200RPM
HD SATA : Maxtor DiamondMax10 250GB @ 7200RPM with 16MB Cache
CD : Samsung CD-Writer (Forgot the rest LOL)
DVD : AOpen DUW1608/ARR (I recommend no one buy this, it's pretty much crap)
BIOS version : 2.10 - All drivers are the latest I could get my hands on (Firmware updated as well)
Issue :
I had purchased my first SATA drive, which seems to be SATA2, so you can say I was rather enthusiastic when I opened my case and inserted the drive. What I first found was that the new SATA's no longer use a 4-pin Molex but a 15-pin SATA power chord, which made me happy, since my PSU does have that. (It's a 350W PSU btw)
NOTE : Remember to check your motherboard specs to know if it supports SATA II or not, if it doesn't - several SATA drives have a jumper that downgrades their native speed to 1.5Gbps, which is SATA I speeds.
Strangely on my Mobo I couldn't find SATA1 and SATA2 but SATA3 and SATA4 were there, so it was ok. I hook up the drive, nothing special there. As a happy camper, I turned on my computer, and checked the BIOS to see if the drive was found - which it was. I continued on into Windows, and to my amazement the drive was NOT there. Thanks to a sweet helper from Holland, Jipman, I learned that I don't need to install God knows what software to get a SATA drive to work, he had the same drives and got them to work without. I trust his word over a lot of people, so I followed his advice and didn't install extra stuff. In stead I went into Disk Management (Right-click on My Computer - Manage) and checked if the drive was there. With the jumper set on 3.0Gbps it wasn't noted as being online, with the jumper set to 1.5Gbps it was.
Now with the drive noted as online in Disk Management, but not anywhere else (but Device Manager) I was worried. But as per Jipman's advice, I should just format it from Disk Management (which was also noted on the Maxtor website). Alas, I got an I/O Controller Error after which the drive vanished from DIsk Management. So again a reboot, trying the same from Partition Magic, again only errors appeared and the drive vanished again.
I even tried unhooking my IDE drive to work solely on the SATa by installing Linux, just to test if it wasn't a Windows issue - which we all know can happen faster than we think. Even then I got an error, couldn't write partition table. So I knew it had to be or a faulty drive, faulty SATA Cable or my motherboard.
Being duly angered, I took the drive back to the shop where I bought it from, they were able to format it - on a VIA Chipset based system. This lead me to feel it was indeed my motherboard. As I had found on several sites, nForce Chipsets kept on having issues with SATA drives. But then for some odd reason, I stumbled upon a Q&A on the nVidia Website, where a patch was brought out for exactly my issue. My drive supports NCQ (Native Command Queue) which is not liked by nForce Chipsets. As soon as I downloaded the patch and applied it - and rebooted as requested, the darned thing worked. I formatted it and it's now running quietly (what a difference with IDE btw!) and smoothly.
Right now, I can only hope nVidia brings out a patch/update that will allow us nVidia Chipset users to use SATA drives with NCQ, but when it is enabled, you will NOT get the drive to work. I know, because I tried for 3 days. Even to the point of my windows no longer booting when the drive was hooked up - which I bypassed by enabling RAID in my BIOS (and no, that is actually standardly included in BIOS versions from 2.x). In order for me to disable the NCQ, I had to have the drive connected, which worked if I enabled the RAID. After the patch, I rebooted, went into my BIOS (for the gazillionth time), disabled RAID - and look and behold - the drive worked!
Now that I've explained everything I did, with the skipping of the repetition of all this tries, the simple solution is DISABLE NCQ y downloading a patch from the nVidia website. I only know this to work with Maxtor DiamondMax 10 since that's the drive I had the issues with, so it's a risk you have to take for yourself.
