[macgeek2005]

I just got 2 320GB Seagate Barracuda drives today from Newegg. They are the latest 7200.10 Perpendicular Recording Technology, 3Gb/s SATA2 Hard drives.

On each hard drive, there are instructions and stuff, and about the jumper block, it shows a picture of a jumper set on two of the four pins, and it says "Limit to 1.5Gb/s operations", and then a picture below it of the 4 pins with no jumper on any of them, and it says 3.0Gb/s operations.

If I understand this right, I want to take that jumper off before putting them in my computer, correct? What am I missing here? Why would anyone want to limit the drive speed to 1.5Gb/s....?

[zerostar]

I believe you need to only limit the drive to 1.5 if your controller supports only 1.5 (as the G5 towers did) you can leave it at 3.0 if your controller handles 3.0 (as the Intel MacPro towers do now)

I don't think there is much of a difference otherwise, no drive today can hit the 1.5Gbs limit (which is almost 190MB/sec if I am correct) let alone the 3.0 (375GB/sec)

Hopefully someone will verify or fix my blunders :-)

[macgeek2005]

Originally Posted by zerostar

I believe you need to only limit the drive to 1.5 if your controller supports only 1.5 (as the G5 towers did) you can leave it at 3.0 if your controller handles 3.0 (as the Intel MacPro towers do now)

I don't think there is much of a difference otherwise, no drive today can hit the 1.5Gbs limit (which is almost 190MB/sec if I am correct) let alone the 3.0 (375GB/sec)

Hopefully someone will verify or fix my blunders :-)

So in other words, I should remove the jumper before putting them in the Mac Pro.

Thanks!

[brokenjago]

Hopefully someone will verify or fix my blunders :-)

the 3.0 (375GB/sec)

375GB/sec!!! HOLY CRAP! That's a 750GB drive in two seconds!!!

[mduell]

Some really cheap 1.5Gb/s controllers have issues with 3Gb/s drives, so you need that jumper. Most, like my SIL3112 based card, work just fine.

FYI 3Gb/s SATA is 300MB/s, not 375MB/s, due to the use of 8b10 encoding.

[macgeek2005]

Originally Posted by mduell

Some really cheap 1.5Gb/s controllers have issues with 3Gb/s drives, so you need that jumper. Most, like my SIL3112 based card, work just fine.

FYI 3Gb/s SATA is 300MB/s, not 375MB/s, due to the use of 8b10 encoding.

So it'll work fine in the Mac Pro, right?

[mduell]

Ya.

[zerostar]

I just divided by 8 ;-) sorry about the GB / MB confusion, but my post will make sense in 10 years! ahahaha