I am using the Silicon Images SIL 3132 PCI Express card and connecting to a T35es Tableau.
In the device manager on my PC, Windows XP 64 bit, it reports any SATA drive I connect as being SATA I and not SATA II. I know the drives I am connecting are definitely SATA II.
Is this another issue of Windows mis reporting? Is there a reason why the speed is staying at SATA I?
The speed readout to which I refer is found in the 'Device Info' tab of the card in Device Manager. It reports everything else about the device connected correctly.
It might not matter in any case. The SIL card is fairly old, as it XP 64bit. So I assume the drives you are connecting are also a few years old.
SATA I was 1.5Gbit/sec. Which is higher than most traditional hard drives can run at. So getting it to run at SATA II would probably not give much extra speed.
Also the SIL 3132 only used a single PCI-E 1.1 lane (~250MB/sec), and this is shared between multiple SATA ports. So if you had two high performance SATA II drives connected, there would be a bottle neck on the PCI-E bus.
No, the drives connecting to it vary in age, some brand new, others a few years old.
I understand that the risk of a bottleneck is at its highest when 2 drives are attached, but currently for testing purposes, I am using 1 drive and trying to determine why the SATA II connection isn't picking up.
And quite right about the age of XP 64bit! Windows 7 is looming, maybe with upgrading the OS, it may correct the problem, or may not…
Thanks for the reply.
I am using the Silicon Images SIL 3132 PCI Express card …
Are you sure? I thought Silicon Images didn't create end-user equipment, but only catered to OEMs, who do the rest, like making the cards, drivers, handling user support etc.
It might be a device driver issue … in which case, you're probably better off talking to whoever made the card.
My apologies, the chipset is a SIL 3132 but the card is a generic make, ST-Labs if I remember rightly, available here in the UK from Maplins.