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Only UDMA2 with SATA drive in internal caddy replacing laptop optical drive

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  • Laptops
  • SATA
  • Optical Media
Last response: in Windows XP
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July 22, 2014 8:55:06 AM

Afternoon, all.

I was just wondering if I could ask for some help pinning down the reason the SATA hard drive I've now fitted in a PATA/ATAPI caddy (in place of the DVD-RW drive which was there before) in my Sony VAIO VGN-S2HP laptop only operates at UDMA2 according to the device manager (ATA secondary channel), when HDTune says it's capable of running at UDMA7. The caddy has an internal SATA socket and an external slim ATAPI socket.

I tried removing and then allowing XP (SP3) to reinstall the ATA controller, but that brought no change. The main (OS) hard drive is IDE and runs at UDMA5. Under the system log in event viewer, I couldn't see any problems relating to the SATA disk I've added in the converter caddy.

Could it be that the flat cable inside the laptop linking the caddy to the mobo doesn't support anything higher than UDMA2? The cable has a slim ATAPI male connector at one end, while the other end plugs into a socket on the mobo where it's held by one of those flippable, socket-wide clips.

I haven't yet tried editing the registry(if that turns out to be one potential solution). What I'd ideally like to do is fit an SSD in the caddy, and load it with a different OS (probably Linux Mint), as I have a spare 120GB SATAIII SSD sitting around. What I'd prefer not to do is spend more money on an IDE SSD, as the choice is limited, seems to be expensive, and doesn't appear to even get close to saturating the PATA bus.

Fingers crossed it's not a BIOS limitation, as there are no settings there to change to remedy the situation as far as I can see.

Regards, Jon.

More about : udma2 sata drive internal caddy replacing laptop optical drive

July 22, 2014 1:10:36 PM

Sigh, a bit moreresearch suggests no more than UDMA2 is possible on a 40-conductor cable, which I suspect I may not be able to change due to the sockets on the mobo and caddy. Benice if the sellers of thesethings mentioned this sort of limitation...

BTW, I tried the Intel Application Acceleratoras well, with the mods on this page:

http://www.highlandsun.com/hyc/centrino/dma.html

All that did was slow the laptop to a slug's pace, though according to the IAA, the main drive was still running at UDMA5.

Time for some more research - is it, in fact, possible to get an 80-conductor cable that will fit a slim ATAPI socket, and the connector on my mobo...

Cheers, Jon.
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