My System: AMD 64 3200 Venice 1GB Matched Corsair Running in Dual Channel Radeon X300SE 1x Seagate ST3320620AS 320gb Sata 2 1x Maxtor 6L300S0 300gb Sata 1 1x Maxtor 6V080E0 80gb Sata 2 I thought I had problems with the 80gb Sata Drive and it was about to die, therefore I bought the Seagate drive and did a fresh install of XP Pro on it. I now have inconsistent problems now. The Seagate drive is only showing as 1.5g/s not 3g/s in device manager. Also when rebooting sometimes the 300gb Maxtor is not seen, then the 80gb sometimes. Could it be the controller on the Motherboard which is a Gigabyte GA-K8N-SLi. I have pulled my hair out trying everything. There are 4 SATA ports which I have tried all configurations of drives. Sometimes rebooting no drives are seen which will then take a few more reboots to get working. Please please help. Running Powermax for the drives would not show the 300gb drive. I then put this in another machine it then showed errors which it fixed. Since then I have formatted the drive though.

"The Seagate drive is only showing as 1.5g/s not 3g/s in device manager." If your mboard does not have the hardware to support SATA-2, if the mboard chipset recognizes the drive at all, it will run it at the speed that the SATA support on the mboard will support - 150mb/s. You can't make the drive run any faster. Some SATA-2 drives have jumper pins available that you can install a jumper on to force the drive into SATA mode, and 150mb/s max speed - with some mboard chipsets that support only SATA, the drive will not be recognized at all unless you install that jumper. If your drive has that option, installing the jumper may make it more reliable on your mboard if the mboard only supports SATA. The 150mb/sec or 300mb/sec is the max BURST speed that the drive can achieve - it is NOT it's data bandwith and most of the time the drive is not moving data that fast - that speed cannot be maintained for more than a short time. Would you notice the difference between 150mb/s and 300mb/s? - probably not. "Also when rebooting sometimes the 300gb Maxtor is not seen, then the 80gb sometimes." Sometimes when a faster hard drive boots the bios will have problem recognizing it sometimes. In many bioses there is a setting that allows you to delay detecting the hard drives a bit during the boot - x seconds - so that faster hard drives can be detected properly every time. e.g. I have a computer that only detects a certain hard drive every time if that is set to about 3 seconds or more. If you don't see anything like that you have to turn off the quick boot setting. or similar, in the bios to give the bios enough time to properly detect the hard drives every time. As for the 80gb drive, download a diagnostic utility from the maker of the hard drive and test the drive - usually there are two tests - a quick and a longer one - run both. If the drive doesn't pass the tests with no faults found for the drive itself (if there are errors only in the data organization on the drive that can be fixed) then you need to copy what data you want to save from the drive to somewhere else while you still can - it is failing and cannot be fixed, at least not without resorting to expensive data recovery procedures you probably wouldn't want to pay for.

Thanks for your reply. I think I have solved the problems, I read somewhere that thee were problems with the nforce4 IDE drivers and NCQ. I disabled command queueing on all my drives. So far it has booted fine and has been running a lot faster. There were entries in event viewer that showed errors with the page file, these have now gone. So fingers crossed that everything stays OK. I have also CHKDSK my 80GB SII drive which has shown 4kb in Bad sectors. I will run Powermax Util and try and get a diagnostic code so I can get an RMA. Thanks again for your help.

Adskin80: I understand that Seagate puts a jumper on their larger SATA2 HDDs in the default position for 1.5Gbps, not 3.0Gbps. I know it's weird, but that's what Seagate does. I've seen it posted quite a few times in different places. Just move the jumper to get full SATA2 speeds, if your mobo supports full SATA2.