Howto get a speed boost on Seagate SATA II HDDs

Theo Valich has started a new blog. Some of you might know him as he used to be a journalist for The Inquirer and TG Daily.

Yesterday he published a pretty interesting article about something he discovered about Seagate SATA II HDDs. These days almost no one checks jumpers on hard disk drives but apparantly this matters a lot on Seagate HDDs as by default, these drives operate in SATA 1.5Gbps mode and not in SATA 3.0Gbps mode. Seagate did this for better compatibility with older motherboards, if you have a SATA II motherboard you need to remove a jumper on the HDD because otherwise you'll lose some performance.

We learned from one Seagate representative in EMEA region that the company made the call to disable SATA-II by default, in order to enhance the compatibility with older motherboards. OEM vendors can ask for delivery of the hard drive with SATA 3.0 Gbps mode turned on, but so far, nobody asked for it. If you jump the gun from WD or Samsung to Seagate, make sure that you pull one small jumper from behind the drive… that jumper locks the drive to SATA-I mode and that’s it.

You can check it out over here. Theo tested it on a 250GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 HDD and discovered the average read speed of his drive jumped from 74.8MB/s to 80.8MB/s while the burst speed skyrocketed from 115.2MB/s to 195.5MB/s.