330 SSD appears as SATA 2, not SATA 3

[idata]

Hello all... I am hoping you can help me with an issue I am having with a new Intel 330 180gb SSD drive. I have been battling with this all weekend, to no avail.

My computer: HP Pavilion HPE h9-1130 Phoenix AMD

Technical details: http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&taskId=120&prodSeriesId=... http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&taskId=120&prodSeriesId=...

Motherboard info: http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c03117539 http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c03117539 HP and Compaq Desktop PCs - Motherboard Specifications, M3970AM-HP (Angelica) - c03117539 - HP Business Support Center

The computer is brand new. It came with Windows 7. I installed the SSD, installed Windows 8 on it and have been booting from the SSD drive. The drive appears fine in BIOS, works in Windows (it is my boot drive) and is recognized by the Intel Toolbox which has no complaints. There are no firmware updates available.

However... when I run benchmark tests, the speeds returned are SATA 2. When I run a utility like Speccy to show me the specs of the drive, it is reporting back as SATA 2 and NOT SATA 3.

The original hard drive that came with the system is consistently reporting as SATA 3. I have swapped cables and swapped SATA ports, both to no avail. I see nothing in the BIOS that will tell me the detected SATA speed so I can determine if it is some kind of Windows driver issue.

I called HP tonight and they were clueless as I thought they would be. According to my research on the motherboard, all 6 ports support SATA 3. HP support was able to confirm this.

Intel's phone support is closed and I will be at work during their normal business hours, so I am hoping you guys can share some of your briliiance. Thank you for any advice. Much appreciated!

[idata]

Another HP as the culprit.

The only way to know for sure (and this sucks, I had the same problem):

• Plug this SSD drive into another machine that you know supports SATA 3
• Plug in another SSD drive that supports SATA 3 and compare the benchmarks

I am wishing you luck. I know your frustration!

[idata]

Well I dont know if I found a solution or not but the drive is now working properly at 6Gb/s. There is one thing that I did that may have just had something to do with it changing to SATA 3. I was reading about the practice of overprovisioning the drive or short stroking the drive. So I went to drive manager and decided to shrink the partition down to less than 160 Gigs. It is a 180 Gig drive. The tech support person said that the drive couldnt be larger than 160 gigs which I remember that there was an option to order this with a SSD of that size. At any rate that was part of the reason to drop the partition size down to just below 160 Gig. After doing that I checked the drive with the Intel Rapid storage Technology Software and the PC Wizard program and nothing had changed. Still sata 2. So I decided to try changing the drive to the other port and see if by chance it would boot from thaqt port and go to SATA 3 because PC Wizard said the available unused port was a SATA3 port. No go! It would not even see thedrive on that port so I was SOL there. The BIOS for this dv7 has no changable inputs at all. Never seen something so devoid of choices in a BIOS before. Cant change the boot order. So I decided to put it back in the port 0 and reboot. I did disconnect all the power and battery in the process of changing the ports and I dont know if that had anything to do with it but when I rebooted the computer and chaeked it the disk was connected at SATA 3! I couldnt believe my eyes when I saw it. In an effort to make myself be convinced I ran a transfer rate test and it was indeed at almost 500Gb/s as advertised.

I hope that this helps someone else avoid all the headaches I went through even if I do not know exactly what made the thing work. Im just glad its working properly now! Thanks to all for the help!