HP Pavilion dv9207us and WD3200BEVT

I'd appreciate any help possible with this situation. I have an HP Pavilion dv9207us and I have installed two WD3200BEVT hard drives. Contrary to this thread http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=260429, the BEVS and BEVT are not the same. The BEVT is supposed to have a SATA II(3.0Gbps) external interface and the BEVS drives only have a SATA I(1.5Gbps) interface.

However in my system, according to HD Tune, they are only running at SATA I. But in my brother's Acer Aspire 5315, they run at full SATA II speed.

I realize that the Intel 82801GBM(ICH7-M) chipset supposedly only supports SATA II on desktop systems, but this is where the weird part comes in.

Today I received two WD3200BEKT 7,200RPM hard drives. After installing one, HD Tune says that it's running at SATA II. At that speed, it's almost double the WD3200BEVT file benchmark speed. Also according to HD Tune, both drives have the same firmware revision (11.01A11).

So my question is, how do I get the BEVT drives to run at SATA II in my HP notebook? Western Digital Level 2 support has no idea and nothing in their database.

 

Can you upload a screenshot of HD Tune's Info Page with the WD3200BEKT drives in.

 

Done, see original post.

 

Ok, I am very sorry to say that both HDDs are not even running in SATA mode, leave out SATA 1 and 2. I don't think the mobile version of the i945 and i965 families support SATA-II atm.
You have AHCI disabled in your BIOS, and if there is an option to toggle it, switching it one will make both drives run in SATA I mode.
Currently, both HDDs are running in IDE mode. Speeds are similar to SATA 1. (just about 5-10% slower)

Also, one way to confirm this is download PC Wizard 2008, Open it, then click on Drives > No. of disk controllers > and you will see the current mode of the HDD.

View attachment 22563

 

Okay, I checked AHCI in the BIOS and it is on. Here is the PC Wizard 2008 Screen Print. For some reason, it only shows one drive attached to the SATA controller. I've run into this problem before when running PerfectDisk and Paragon Disk Manager on the second drive. In fact, I'm unable to run PerfectDisk on the second drive if it has to reboot to defrag.

 

6 HDDs..

One drive has AHCI on, and also has IDE Legacy: Yes

The other has AHCI off.

Does you notebook have 6 HDD slots , 2 or 1..??

 

LOL, not 6 just 2 internal and 4 USB. The IDE controller is attached to the DVD-Writer, but I don't know how to turn off IDE Legacy Mode. I've tried the Intel Matrix Driver, but then HD Tune doesn't report the info and SMART for the second hard drive.

I also checked Intel's data sheet for the IHC8-M and it does support SATA 2. It was the reason my brother wanted the WD3200BEVT and not the BEVS for his Aspire.

 

Here are the HD Tune Screen Prints from my brother's Acer Aspire 5313-2153. I'm not sure if these were before or after he put in the T7100, but it shouldn't have made much difference in the hard drive speed.

 

Ok, then 965GM must be supporting SATA-II, I am not so sure on that.
But device manager shows UDMA 6 for both HDDs, whereas HD Tune shows UDMA 5. Weird..!!
To disable the IDE Legacy Mode, you will have to contact the notebook manufacturer, and address the issue to them.

Theory: Maybe your notebook does not support AHCI on 2 drives. So, maybe the 1st drive (as seen in PC Wizard) has AHCI disabled and is running in IDE mode, and is causing the 2nd drive to run in IDE mode too (hence the IDE legacy enabled thing you see). Try connecting both HDDs individually, and then check in PC Wizard and HD Tune, if anything changes, and also remove the 4 externals.

 

Hey Andy, thanks for all the help. It doesn't look like I'll be able to enable the SATA 2 mode on the BEVT drives on my HP notebooks.

I've installed the latest version of the Intel Matrix Storage driver and other than screwing up the SMART and Info for the primary(was wrong about which one), it doesn't make any difference in speed other than at the low end.

I can't switch or use the boot drive in the other bay. My computer will only boot from the first bay.

Here are the HD Tune screen prints with using the Intel driver.

 

Ok, But don't play around with it much. Let the drives run in IDE mode. I have the WD3200BEVT, running in IDE mode, and when I installed a different BIOS, I didn't notice much of an increase in performance. And I don't think running SATA HDDs in IDE mode will cause any harm, though you can research this topic.

Current


Native Mode
View attachment 22580

IDE Mode

 

Okay, thanks for the info. I think I'm going back to the Vista drivers. The Intel Matrix drivers aren't fully compatible with HD Tune, but work just fine with Everest.

One thing I don't understand about your screen shots is why my burst rate is half yours in either mode? Mine should be close to the max throughput the way yours is, unless there is a problem with the latency slowing down the results.

 

High CPU usage maybe. Try running with minimal backgroud services. I normally terminate services manually through Task Manager.