Sorry to raise a dead thread, but I wanted to post my own experience here with this particular drive and the jumper settings, especially since I relied on the information in this thread when I made my own purchasing decision.
My particular experience with the ST2000DL003 was that the jumper did not make the drive compatible with my motherboard.
There's no reason for me to think that this is a fluke or a bad drive either, because I bought a pair of these drives at the same time, and neither one worked with the SATA controller on my motherboard that does not support SATA speed auto-negotiation (the VIA VT8237 chipset). Both drives work perfectly fine when hooked to a different SATA controller. The VT8237 works perfectly fine with older SATA 150 hard drives.
Here are the details of my configuration, for everyone's reference:
Hard drive model: Seagate ST2000DL003
(Purchased as retail box model ST320005N4A1AS-RK)
P/N: 9VT166-302
Firmware: CC3C
Date Code: 12295
Purchase Date: 04/14/2012
Motherboard: MSI K8T Neo-FIS2R (MS-6702)
SATA Controller: VIA VT8237 (does not support SATA speed auto-negotiation)
SATA Controller speed: 150 MBps (1.5 Gbps)
As mentioned, I purchased the retail box version, which comes with an instruction manual. Interestingly enough, the manual even mentions the jumper block on the drive:
3Gb/sec SATA drive connected to a 1.5GB/sec SATA card or motherboard:
Older 1.5Gb/sec SATA motherboards and host controllers equipped with VIA VT8237, VT8237R, VT6420, VT6421L, SIS760, and SIS964 do not support auto speed negotiation with newer 3.0Gbit drives. Systems with these chipsets will hang, lock-up, or fail to detect during boot.
Applying a jumper to the outer-most pins of the jumper block will force the drive into the 1.5Gb/sec transfer mode -- allowing it to function on the above mentioned chipsets.
So, despite the fact that the installation guide states that this should work, and it names my VIA VT8237 chipset explicitly, and the retail package even comes with a jumper provided in the box, I could not get my SATA controller to recognize either of the two drives. I tried with the jumper in the recommended position, I tried it in every other possible position, and I tried without the jumper at all, and nothing made this drive work with my chipset.
I'm posting my own experience here as a warning to others, but all of the above having now been said, I did ultimately decide to keep the drives and not return them to the store. Luckily for me, my motherboard has a second SATA controller on it, a Promise 20378, and these drives work perfectly fine with it. I'm not particularly upset at the situation since I work with computers for a living and I expect incompatibilities like this to pop up every now and then, but I do think that Seagate either needs to revisit the documentation packaged with this drive or fix the firmware. As for the drives themselves, they seem to be quality components. I ran some brutal week-long tests on both of them using the Linux utility Badblocks in destructive write mode ("badblocks -svw -b 4096 /dev/sda") and they held up fine: no bad blocks, all SMART tests passed afterward, and the actual SMART attributes looked good.
AskTheLeaf
