Because some SATA-300 hard disk drives don’t work correctly on motherboards with SATA-150 ports, some SATA-300 hard disk drives have a SATA-150/SATA-300 jumper (also known as 1.5 Gbps/3 Gbps jumper). The problem is that by default this jumper comes configured in the “SATA-150” position, limiting your hard disk drive performance if it is installed on a motherboard with SATA-300 ports. We will show you the performance impact of having a SATA-300 wrongly configured in a moment.

So before installing a SATA-300 hard disk drive you should check if it has a SATA-150/SATA-300 jumper and if it is configured on the correct position: if you have an old motherboard with SATA-150 ports you should maintain this jumper on the SATA-150 position, but if your motherboard has SATA300 – as it occurs with almost all motherboards present on the market today – you should move its position to “SATA-300.” This information can be usually found on the hard disk drive label, as shown in Figure 8.

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Figure 8: Detail on the hard disk drive label explaining about the SATA-150/SATA-300 jumper.

This particular hard disk drive (a Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 160 GB) comes with a jumper limiting the hard disk drive performance to 150 MB/s (1.5 Gbps), see Figure 9. To make it properly work as a SATA-300 device, we must remove this jumper (see the diagram in Figure 8). In this case the jumper can be removed with a small flat tip screwdriver, small pliers or tweezers. Note that depending on the hard disk drive model you may need to move the position of the jumper instead of having it removed. So it is very important to pay attention on what is written on the hard disk drive label.

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Figure 9: Hard disk drive with its SATA-150/SATA-300 jumper on the “SATA-150” position.

What is the performance impact of having a SATA-300 hard disk drive wrongly configured? We made some tests in our lab to show you this. We measured the transfer rate of our Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 160 GB hard disk drive with three different programs, SpeedDisk32, HD Tach and HD Tune, first with the jumper on its default configuration (“SATA-150”) and then removing the jumper and thus making the hard disk drive a truly SATA-300 device. You can see the results below (click here for a full description of the system we used on this benchmarking).

As you can see the results on the three programs show the same thing. Even though the maximum, average and minimum transfer rates remained the same, with the jumper in the SATA-300 position the burst transfer rate increased between 60% and 69%.

In summary, don’t forget to check for the existence and the correct position of this jumper when installing SATA-300 hard disk drives!