Sata III SSD on Sata I mobo?

[psychoclown81]

I acquired a cheap sata III ssd recently (30 GB ADATA SP600 series) and wanted to throw it into an old LGA775 dual core setup i had laying around to make it a quick light use pc (as opposed to the sluggish old hdd it had)... It is a Sata I mobo, but the SSD is recognized properly in the bios. On windows installation, the SSD is also recognized properly (name, size etc) but windows is unable to format the SSD so installation fails.

So i booted into windows on the HDD and attempted to format the SSD from RAW to NTFS using the storage tools manager as well as the basic format utility, and both fail whether doing a quick or full format, device defaults etc.

I threw it into a different Sata I setup (old AMD rig) and the same story is the case.

Finally i tried it in a Sata II PC and it worked flawlessly..

I read that Sata I and III are backwards/forwards compatible, which makes sense considering they use identical connectors/cables etc, but this seems to not be the case. Is there anything I can do to make the disk work with this old machine or am I just wasting my time? thanks for any input

 

[molletts]

Does the motherboard support AHCI mode on the SATA controller? It's more or less mandatory for SSDs as (I believe) it's the only way of sending DISCARD (TRIM) commands to the drive. There may well be other commands that don't work through a SATA controller in ATA mode.

Have a look in BIOS Setup and see if you can set the SATA controller mode to AHCI. Updating to the latest BIOS for the board would probably be worthwhile if you're not already running it.

You may find that you can't boot successfully from the HDD after switching the controller mode - switching the mode back will fix this. (It's to do with the wrong driver being loaded during Windows startup - I can't remember whether this still affects Win7.)

 

[mafisometal]

If it supports AHCI, you'll be good. I've used SATA I boards before on my Corsair Force III and it didn't work as fast as it does on SATA III but it's still faster than HDD.

 

[JohnnyLucky]

What is the brand and model of your Intel based socket LGA 775 motherboard?

A lot of them were designed before the introduction of consumer level solid state drives. As a result, the really old boards supported SATA based hard disk drives, cd-rom drives, and optical drives but did not support ssd's. In addition the motherboard's system BIOS did not have an ACHI mode. Sometimes there were patches and fixes and sometimes there weren't. Some motherboards added support in motherboard revisions that were released later. For example an original Rev. 1.0 board did not suport ssd's but a Rev. 2.3 board that was released much later did.

 

[psychoclown81]

Thanks for the input guys, both boards are from low end OEM pc's, the LGA775 board is an OLD HP. As in Pentium 4/ Pentium D/ Celeron D only, not core 2 duo/quad. The AMD was an emachine's socket 754 board, so single core athlon 64's are the upper limit of what it can handle. I didn't notice an AHCI option for either, as both have pretty limited bios options. Also, very limited bios updates from the OEM's. I think i'll throw the SSD in a laptop I have that has a failing HDD