SATA compatibility - can anyone explain this?

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Karsten75

Karsten75

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Oct 15, 2009
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Working on an old laptop: A HP Pavilion DV2000 from around 2007. Processor is MAD Turion 64 X2 (1800 MHz), chipset is AMD K8, RAM is DDR2 723.

Laptop came to me with a drive missing. That's where it got strange. I happened to have two laptop drives.

- an older (dated 2008) Hitachi Travelstar 160 GB model K7200 (https://www.hgst.com/sites/default/files/resources/7K200DS.pdf) salvaged from a Lenovo Thinkpad

- slightly more recent (dated 2011) Hitachi Travelstar 320 GB model Z5K320 (https://www.hgst.com/sites/default/files/resources/TS_Z5K320_DS_final.pdf) salvaged from a Toshiba laptop.

The older drive is a SATA 1.5Gb/second 7200 rpm model, while the newer drive is a 3 Gbps 4500 rpm model.

The newer drive was NOT compatible with the controller on the motherboard of the HP pavilion. Both the BIOS and the Vista install could see it, but could not run diagnostics, format it or in any way interact.

The older drive worked perfectly well.

Can anyone explain what could cause this? It was always my understanding that SATA was simply compatible.

In this scenario, I'm just glad I didn't accede to the HP owner's request to acquire and install an SSD - I'm pretty sure it would also not have worked, right?
 
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In early implementations of SATA there were a few SATA controller chip makers whose code apparently was NOT able to adjust to the newer SATA II (now called SATA 3Gb/s) communication speed, even though the SATA standards call for that to work. Those troublesome early SATA I (SATA 1.5 Gb/s) chips could only communicate with HDD's that worked at the 1.5 Gb/s communication rate. It appears that is what has caused your problem.

SOME SATA II (SATA 3 Gb/s) drives have an option to install a jumper on a particular pin pair on the back edge of the drive to force the drive to work only at the slower SATA 1.5 Gb/s rate, and this would allow the drive to work with those old drive controllers. (Normally, you do NOT use any jumper on a SATA drive's...
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InvalidError

InvalidError

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May 18, 2007
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Different companies design their SATA ports' logic slightly differently from each other. Even though both implementations may be SATA-compliant as far as the SATA qualification test suite may be concerned, quirks when the two compliant components get connected together may still occur due to subtle divergences in how the different implementations react to certain sequences.

Hardware compatibility has never been and never will be 100% guaranteed unless components have been specifically tested together. But it is nowhere near as bad as it used to be 20+ years ago.
 
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smorizio

smorizio

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Jan 22, 2010
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also with hardware the error happen more with 3 party non intel chipsets. in real world the newer drive and chipset should have fallen over to the slower speed. may be a bios or chipset issue. happens a lot with older oem. a lot of time they set video and drive size limits or hardware out passes the oem vendor.
 
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Paperdoc

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Oct 19, 2006
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In early implementations of SATA there were a few SATA controller chip makers whose code apparently was NOT able to adjust to the newer SATA II (now called SATA 3Gb/s) communication speed, even though the SATA standards call for that to work. Those troublesome early SATA I (SATA 1.5 Gb/s) chips could only communicate with HDD's that worked at the 1.5 Gb/s communication rate. It appears that is what has caused your problem.

SOME SATA II (SATA 3 Gb/s) drives have an option to install a jumper on a particular pin pair on the back edge of the drive to force the drive to work only at the slower SATA 1.5 Gb/s rate, and this would allow the drive to work with those old drive controllers. (Normally, you do NOT use any jumper on a SATA drive's pins - they are not like IDE units!) For example, WD units do this with a jumper on Pins 5&6, but that is ONLY on WD's desktop drives. WD did not design these into their smaller laptop models. And besides, that was WD's way - does not apply to Hitachi. I have searched and found there are no pin pairs on the back of the Z5K320 drives. Now, there were some HDD makers who had a similar "fix", but it was done by using a small software utility to write a change to the data on the HDD unit itself. I could not find any hint of that for Hitachi drives. So I cannot tell you any way to get that newer unit to work IF the problem is that the old laptop's system cannot deal with a SATA II drive.

Sorry, no fix offered here, but some explanation.

 
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