Hi, I've owned the SATA2 since around mid-June, but have only recently run into any problems with it. I finally moved from an 80GB (was getting CRAMPED) EIDE drive to a Western Digital 500GB SATA2 drive (WDS5000AAKS) over this past weekend. The drive was cloned using DriveImage XML as to avoid re-installing Windows XP completely since I just did it in June. The system seems to run just fine on the new drive, but I've noticed a couple odd things so far:
1) running HWINFO32 (version 1.77) on my system reports NO SATA drives connected. The only entry under the SATA/IDE section is my NEC DVD Burner (IDE). This seems quite odd.
2) when trying to run the Western Digital Diagnostics program, as soon as it attempts to perform a "Quick Test" on the drive, the test fails with "Cable error". I've tried reseating the SATA cable, but nothing's changed.
3) Everything I've tested the drive with shows it as having a 5400 RPM speed. However, it is (supposedly anyhow) a 7200 RPM drive.
Now, if I use the WD Diagnostics boot CD and run it from the DOS version, it seems able to read the drive just fine.
I'm just wondering if there are any known issues with the 8237S Via SATA2 controller on this board, as far as compatibility with things like HWINFO32? Sisoft Sandra appears to see everything okay. As I stated, it does appear to work fine, but the HWINFO32 test in particular bothers me somewhat.
I plan on maybe picking up a Silicon Image based SATAII card later today or tomorrow (the PNY SATAII PCI-express one that Best Buy sells) to see if, when connected to it, the tests show the same odd results. That leads me to my last question actually, the PCI-E slot on the board is referred to as "PCI-E Graphics" in all the documentation. I've heard of cases where the PCI-E slot is somehow hardwired to really only work with graphics cards... is that the case with this board, or would the SATAII PCI-E controller work okay in that slot? If it won't, I believe they do have a PCI model as well, and from what I understand the difference in speed between SATAII and SATA is negligible at best anyhow.
Thanks in advance for any suggestions/replies. The SATA2 board has been great for the 50 bucks I paid for it
FYI, I'm running with the 1.70 official BIOS, with the latest chipset 4 in 1 pack (5.60A) from VIAARENA and a Quad Core 2600 slightly underclocked (the 5%~ that AsRock mentions you'd lose), satisfied with the performance enough that I'm not interested in trying to gain the clock speed back really.