SATA 3GB Speed On K8N SLI/FI

DonZ · nFHQ Member

Please help!

I have tried everything to get my two SATA II drives running WIN XP Pro SP2B in non-RAID mode to run at 3GB speed. My two SATA drives are a Seagate Barracuda ST3250410AS and a WD2500KS. The boot drive is the Seagate.

I guess my first question is does the MCP04 SATA chip on the nForce4 SLI m/b support the 3GB option shown in WIN XP's nForce4 SATA Controller speed option in device manager? It is currently greyed out with both controllers showning 1.5GB and the "use BIOS default option" set on (checked).

My BIOS ver is the most current ver 1.8. I have installed XP multiple times using and not using the F6 option to load the RAID drivers, switched SATA ports and cables, set the above "use BIOS default option" on/off and manually set speed option to 3GB, etc. I have tried everything including hacking XP registry settings only to have them always revert back to the 1.5GB setting.

I have talked to MSI, Seagate, and Microsoft about this and they are all totally clueless as to why the speed is not set to 3GB for the nForce4 controllers.

JTKWalesUK1981 · nForce Aware

i think it should support SATA II, some drives have a jumper on them which i know the SEAGATES do which default set them to 1.5GB, take a look at the drives and see if the jumper settings are correct

DonZ · nFHQ Member

Both drives have had their jumpers removed. It was the first thing I did in the installation process.

I have uninstalled the Nvidia IDE driver which took me back to the XP's default driver. Did some additional benchmarking and drives are running 15% faster using XP's native SATA drivers! So I am just going to stick with XP SP2 drivers and forget about nVidia's.

By the way, my drives are/have been running in SATA II mode i.e.; NCQ, etc. were active. For some unknown reason, XP is downgrading the drives to 1.5GB speeds. That I verfified by looking at the nVidia SATA controller XP registry entries. This also could be a BIOS issue in that the two SATA drives I have are newer models and their firmware might not be recognized properly by the BIOS. I told MSI to upgrade their BIOS for this m/b but I am not holding my breath.

All I can say is that the nForce4 chipset sucks.