New 80Gb SATA Western Digital disc, not working though :(

ReFredzRate

Hey guys (and girls of course), I just got me a new SATA disc, and it seems not to be working. I have the bad feeling that the disc is dead. I've never had any trouble with harddisks before, but this one seems to be DOA.

When I plug it into the SATA and Molex, and boot the computer, the disk just starts to:
*tick*...............................*tick*.............................*tick*..........................*tick*

What do you think?

webmaster

I think it's time to use the warranty :S

ReFredzRate

Yeah well, right now I have the disk for only 2 days, so the warranty is still valid. Only problem is, I have to take it 15km away from home to stand in line in the shop for about 2 hours to FINALLY get it replaced. I think I'll call them today.

Phate

maybe try calling WD, not the store you got it from

ReFredzRate

Nah, I'm not even going to try to get it to work. I don't have the time for that. The store's open at 11 tomorrow morning. I'll be hopping by that store on my f***ing day off >_<'

ReFredzRate

So I had my disk RMA'd and got a new one now. It doesn't tick, that's a good thing. However, my motherboard/sata controller still doesn't pick up the harddisk.
I'll have to do some serious testing to find out what might be wrong with the damn SATA controller or maybe the harddisk or whatever.
Anyhow, I can't say that I'm really happy with SATA.

webmaster

Is this your first SATA disk that you're using or have you used and installed them before?

ReFredzRate

Was my first SATA disk ever. Finally I've found out what the problem is. My BIOS still only supports SATA generation I, my disk is SATA generation II. This means I have to jumper pin 5+6 on the back of the disk, to make it generation I compatible. Well... now maybe installing Windows on it would be nice...

Phate

hmmm... what is the difference between the 2 generations?

ReFredzRate

Speed.... As far as I know gen I goes up to 150Mb/s, gen II goes up to 200Mb/s.

webmaster

Is that Megabyte or Megabit ?

MB = Megabyte
Mb = Megabit

johneva

Hia

Well they can go quicker than that too. Very Happy

Western Digital will be releasing a new Raptor drive in the coming weeks. It'll have a capacity of 150GB, 10,000rpm, NCQ, 16MB Cache, and SATAII 300MB/sec interface. These drives should be very nice performers.
Check out both these links.
http://www.overclockersclub.com/?read=2847638
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/storage/display/20051223083509.html

webmaster

But if I have two of thoose disks, can I really send data that fast between them?

johneva

Well thats the thing though int it,
you need to have other things working at that speed to be able to use it, also you would need the demand for it. Just cos it can go that quick dont mean it will be going that quick.
Though it will still make a difference with that kinda seek time and transfer rate.
Load times for everything will improve also boot times.
At the moment WD Raptors are the only HD's using 10,000 RPM that I know off and seek times are pretty much half the time of everything else.

There is an 74 Gig WD Raptor thats been out for a while now but it does not have some of the new features that are used in this new 150Gb one.
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?WD-740GD