If you use Seagate drives, read this!
 

I am posting this here, as many are doing HD stuff and have Seagate Barracuda drives in their RAIDS.

This may be old news to some, but I just stumbled across it and immediately confirmed it with the Seagate PDF, then like any of you would have done, immediately yanked out the jumpers off all the drives and confirmed that it does indeed limit I/O!

Though the 1.5Gbps to 3.0 GBps shouldn't make a big dif, it does and it did. I would suggest you try it after checking it out yourself. On the jumper block there should be NO jumpers for 3.0 Gbps. There is on all mine and that's true apparently of ALL SEAGATE BARRACUDAS!:

http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/s...100452348b.pdf

I seriously couldn't believe it, but the proof is in the use. It seems to somehow affect the cache and for scrolling in the timelines, that's crucial.

What the heck is going on in their heads?

Just so you know, one two drive RAID jumped from a max (I couldn't figure out why the heck it was so slow!) of 69MBps, to 130MBps after the data was in the cache!

That is nothing to sneeze at and maybe could explain sometimes why Intel has been getting some much flack for having "slow RAIDs".

Many people still have SATA 150's in their system. Is the jumper necessary to make a SATA 3.0 work in a SATA 1.5?

I'm not sure I have the answer to that. It really seems the jumper is only to identify the drive as a Generation 1 or 2.

I didn't mind Seagate putting on the jumper, but DID mind them not bothering to tell me about it. On paper, 1.5Gbps would seem to be more than enough to cover the 105MBps many of these drives are capable of, but as to actual performance, something appears to hit the cache when it's jumpered.

Maybe someone else can shed some light on this? I removed the jumpers and immediately noticed a difference in both my RAID and eSATA. It would seem anyone with a 3.0Gbps capable system could possibly benefit.

Anybody reading this post have more info on this?

Although SATA 3.0 is backwards compatible with SATA 1.5, some older SATA 1.5 controllers can't cope with 3.0 drives. So, Seagate likely installs the jumper by default to minimize support calls and unnecessary returns.

I'm sure that's the case. I just wish they'd make it more clear, like maybe a sticker on their OEM drives?

C'est la vie...