Enabling faster hard drive speeds?

hatehereyes · Aug 15, 2008

I just recently bought 3 Western Digital hard drives.

First one is a
Western Digital - Caviar GP 1TB Internal SATA Hard Drive

Second is
Western Digital Caviar SE16 Internal SATA 320GB Hard Drive

Third is
WD Caviar Blue WD400JD - hard drive - 40 GB - SATA-300

my question is do i have to configure the jumpers to enable faster tranfer speeds or are they already maximized by default?

ZeratuelX · Aug 15, 2008

They are maximized to a "safe" level, in which if something happens you won't lose data. If you want to speed them up past this level and risk losing data in the event of a surge or other event, keep reading.

Hit Windows + Pause/Break keys. Your computer details should open up. Click advanced system settings. Go to the Hardware tab and click Device Manager. now expand the Disk Drives icon and right click on your installed and plugged in hard drive and hit Properties. Go to the Policies tab and check Enable write caching on the disk. If you want it to go even faster, hit enable advanced performance.

NOTE: IF YOU DO THIS YOUR CHANCES OF LOSING DATA GO UP BY A LARGE AMOUNT.

+Rep me if I helped
ZeratuelX

Fumz · Aug 15, 2008

hatehereyes said:
my question is do i have to configure the jumpers to enable faster tranfer speeds or are they already maximized by default?

Yes, remove the jumper for SATA3.0. You won't get 3.0 speeds, nobody does, but that's how you configure the drives.

NOTE: IF YOU DO THIS YOUR CHANCES OF LOSING DATA GO UP BY A LARGE AMOUNT.

That's not true. What's true is this:

This option enables extremely aggressive write caching that will speed up the hard drive's performance, but it can also cause you to lose data in the drive's cache if you lose power suddenly. It is not recommended for laptops that run on battery power all the time. While this is fine for the normal home desktop, it may not be a good idea if you have unreliable power.

So if you lose power, you can lose data, but that happens anyway if you lose power whether you enable this feature or not. Enable it; it's fine for home systems. I would purchase a UPS though, not only for this, but for overall system health.

ZeratuelX · Aug 15, 2008

I'm sorry for not being so crystal clear... But what I said wasn't wrong either.

Fumz · Aug 15, 2008

You left off the most important part of why you would lose data: a power outage. By leaving that all important fact out you implied that enabling write caching alone would cause a loss of data, and that's just not true. I'm not being nit-picky, just clearing up misinformation. No reason to get mad at me for that.

roy69 · Aug 15, 2008

Guys it is simple, using a cache of any sort will cause data loss in the event of a power outage. The chance of a power outage depends where you live. If you are likly to get a power outage get a UPS as fumz suggested. Fumz reading the text I dont think anyone was getting nit-picky.

Everlong · Aug 15, 2008

I tried enabling it when I got my new drivers and the increase in speed seemed negligible for me really. Left the advanced caching disabled in the end.

sidewinder · Aug 15, 2008

People are talking about two very different things here.

First, let's be clear in our nomenclature:

The faster mode is called "SATA 3.0 Gbit/s". With no jumper in place, on most SATA 3.0 Gbit/s drives, SATA 3.0 Gbit/s mode is enabled. Only older systems would require the enabling of SATA 1.5 Gbit/s mode.

ZeratuelX answered a different question than what the OP asked. Setting the speed mode of the drive has nothing to do with the "write cache" or "advanced performance" settings in Vista or XP.

According to the Intel web site, the Intel D915GUX mobo uses the ICH6 chip for SATA and does not support the SATA 3.0 Gbit/s mode so I would recommend installing the jumper on the "OPT1 Enabled" pins on your WD hard drives to enable SATA 1.5 Gbit/s mode.

As far as the "write cache" or "advanced performance" settings are concerned, I don't think it is a huge risk to enable them without a UPS nor do I think there is a lot to be gained from enabling them unless you have some disk intensive activities going on.

S-

johngalt · Aug 15, 2008

Thank you sidewinder - I was going to post pretty much everything that you did - it was concise, and more importantly, completely tactful.

hatehereyes · Aug 19, 2008

sidewinder said:
People are talking about two very different things here.

First, let's be clear in our nomenclature:

The faster mode is called "SATA 3.0 Gbit/s". With no jumper in place, on most SATA 3.0 Gbit/s drives, SATA 3.0 Gbit/s mode is enabled. Only older systems would require the enabling of SATA 1.5 Gbit/s mode.

ZeratuelX answered a different question than what the OP asked. Setting the speed mode of the drive has nothing to do with the "write cache" or "advanced performance" settings in Vista or XP.

According to the Intel web site, the Intel D915GUX mobo uses the ICH6 chip for SATA and does not support the SATA 3.0 Gbit/s mode so I would recommend installing the jumper on the "OPT1 Enabled" pins on your WD hard drives to enable SATA 1.5 Gbit/s mode.

As far as the "write cache" or "advanced performance" settings are concerned, I don't think it is a huge risk to enable them without a UPS nor do I think there is a lot to be gained from enabling them unless you have some disk intensive activities going on.

S-

this is exactly the answer i was looking for.
thank you.

i just installed the jumper on the 5/6 pins to enable 1.5gb on the 1tb hard drive.

if i were to install the same jumper on the other hard drives and the boot drive would it help my boot up time?

Everlong · Aug 19, 2008

Why would you want 1.5GB/s when the default is 3.0GB/s?

With my hard drives, putting the jumpers on converts it to 1.5GB/s transfer speeds. Leaving them off keeps 3.0GB/s.

hatehereyes · Aug 19, 2008

because one of the previous posts said that my mobo doesn't even support 3.0gb/s so the best thing to do would be 1.5gb/s

sidewinder · Aug 19, 2008

Everlong18 said:
Why would you want 1.5GB/s when the default is 3.0GB/s?

With my hard drives, putting the jumpers on converts it to 1.5GB/s transfer speeds. Leaving them off keeps 3.0GB/s.

Because the OP's motherboard SATA controller does not support the SATA 3.0 Gbit/s standard. It only supports the SATA 1.5 Gbit/s so, for the drives to work reliably, the OP needs to jumper all his drives to work in SATA 1.5 Gbit/s mode.

S-

sidewinder · Aug 19, 2008

hatehereyes said:
this is exactly the answer i was looking for.
thank you.

i just installed the jumper on the 5/6 pins to enable 1.5gb on the 1tb hard drive.

if i were to install the same jumper on the other hard drives and the boot drive would it help my boot up time?

hatehereyes,

You are welcome! You won't get a performance increase, at least you shouldn't, but you will insure that the drives work reliably with your system.

S-

Everlong · Aug 19, 2008

Ah, I see. Must have misread that part then.

Enabling faster hard drive speeds?

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