VeganFanatic is absolutely right that the VIA chipset is not compliant to SATA specs, and this is exactly why it requires a jumper on any SATA II or III drives connected to it to force them down to SATA I speeds since the controller is incapable of telling the drive this itself. Where other SATA I controllers, like the one on VeganFanatic's Asus M2NBP-VM CSM, are able to cope with the situation because they were built properly to spec, both Marc_'s motherboard and mine suffer from flawed design.
The point here, however, is that both Marc_ and I went into our hard drive purchasing decision knowing full well that we require hard drives with this 1.5Gbps jumper feature in order for them to work with our motherboards. Because this feature is becoming more rare, we know that the onus is on us to do thorough research into the capabilities of a hard drive before we purchase it. In Marc_'s case, there was not enough information available from Seagate for him to be able tell one way or another whether this model hard drive supports being jumpered down to 1.5Gbps or not, so he ultimately had to return his drive for a refund rather than risk being stuck owning something he couldn't use. In my own case, I also found Seagate's online information to be inconclusive, but I took the risk and bought the drives anyway from a retail store in my area where I knew the return policy would be headache-free if I needed to bring back the drives. When I opened up the box, I found not only an instruction manual claiming that the jumper would work as I expected it to, but I also found a jumper itself provided in a little bag in the box.
VeganFanatic, I'd like to politely suggest that you re-read my first post in this thread because it sounds like you may have missed this part:
ven0042 wrote:
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 don't take issue with Seagate for choosing to drop support for legacy hardware. If I were them, I wouldn't want to be bothered having to expend resources on an issue that affected a small minority of SATA controllers from two generations of technology ago either.
What I do take issue with is that Seagate's documentation does not properly reflect the fact that they have dropped the 1.5Gbps jumper feature. The information available on their website is pretty murky and grey about it, and the information that came in the same box as the hard drive was just flat out wrong. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask Seagate to fix that.
