SA290 SATA III Disabled with BIOS?

I was updating my laptop with the Sony Vaio Care and found that my BIOS was out of date, so I updated the BIOS.I have a SATA III SSD in my laptop and I am getting 6 GB/s transfer rates with write speeds of approximately 500 MB/s. After the update, however, the Intel Rapid Storage Technology installed on my SA shows that it is only on SATA II now with 3 GB/s and all my read/write times are significantly slower than before the update at around only 240 MB/s. Has SATA III been disabled on the SA with the new BIOS update? And if so, how come it was disabled? I decided to get SSD in order to take advantage of the SATA III that I had in this laptop when I first purchased it and now it's just been disabled.

 

It was disabled, indeed, with newer BIOS. If you want older BIOS, check in the SA/SB/SC/SD owners thread for info on that. There is an effort to modify current BIOS to enable SATAIII.


Who knows why Sony disabled SATA III later on. Battery life? To differentiate the Z2 lineup? Because NO configurable SA/SB/SC/SD option included a SATA III drive (so was then superfluous)? I dunno, really. Though this question, and the user answers, has riled some beans in the past.

 

Is the benefits of the new BIOS worth not having SATA III compared to the older BIOS? And the battery life increase due throttled SATA II speeds is false, as my battery estimated time has not changed at all, even with a new SSD compared to the stock HDD, oddly.

 

Only in continuous load testing (aka, not very realistic - though there is a bit of real world use in that), would SATAIII drives draw more power in SATAIII vs SATAII mode.

For me, it's worthwhile. I'm using a Corsair Performance 3 SSD - so it's no slug, either. However, the better thermal control, combined with a few bug fixes, kept me on the new BIOS (technically UEFI, lol...)

 

yea like this thing gets good battery life with sata2 lol. 3 hrs either way

 

heh 4:30 off of 80% battery care, here. Though to be fair, that is more of a function of how I use my laptop (though looking as the owner's thread, it may as well be sheer luck ).

 

also mine is an i7 with two hard drives...

 

So you were getting 6 GB/s with the old BIOS? Did you have to do anything to enable it?

Is it because I have an SB?

 

I have an i5 with a 120GB Kingston HyperX and I get around 5-6 hours with WiFi on and Stamina mode on. On Speed mode I get around 2-2.5 hours.
Odd side note, right after I installed the SSD, I checked the estimated usage time on 100% and it said around 8.5 hours and I was ecstatic! Sadly, this changed a few minutes later after a second look

And yes, I was getting 6 GB/s instantly when I installed the SSD without activating or enabling anything. I updated the BIOS the next day and then the SATA was throttled down to 3 GB/s right after I restarted. It might possibly be because you have an SB though.

 

I wonder if I ruined my chances after updating the bios. I reflashed with the older bios but am still seeing sata 2 speed....Hopeless.