Samsung 2.5" SATA 1.5Gbps Jumper Setting

I am having trouble using an internal 2.5" laptop SATA 3Gbps (aka SATA II) in an old laptop. I simply want to try setting the jumper to force the hard drive to use 1.5Gbps. While this sounds simple enough, the jumper setting seems to be a complete mystery!

I failed to find the answer on the Samsung website - they show the jumper setting for 3.5" internal desktop SATA hard drives, but not for 2.5" laptop ones. There're references to using the jumper for laptop hard drives all over their site (on the user manuals for most of the laptop SATA hard drives, in FAQs etc) but No mention of what the setting actually is. I even emailed their tech support to ask them, pointing out they only show the 3.5 jumper setting. A week later they handily replied with the exact link I gave them, telling me that 3.5" and 2.5" hard drives use the same jumper settings. This would be good advice however 3.5" drives have 8 jumper pins, and 2.5" drives have 4...

Other manufacturer's (especially Seagate) are very informative and it's easy to find the jumper settings. Seems that in each case I've found, the jumper is set to the two pins furthest from the SATA connections.

With 4 pins there's three possible configurations (assuming 1 jumper). I highly doubt the middle two would be the right two (B and C), but that leaves the left two or the right two as being potential positions. I might imagine that one setting would force 1.5Gbps, and the other limits hard drives to 36GB. But I'm nervous that putting a jumper in the wrong place would do some damage.

Assuming everyone reading this also fails to find the jumper position, my next question is what is the danger of jumping the incorrect pins? Has anyone jumped the wrong pins for disasterous results? Also is there a way to test if the hard drive is running at 3 or 1.5Gbps - equally annoying would be to correctly jump the pins but not realize I've done so!

Any advice would be very gratefully received!


Samsung's only image of jumper position for SATA hard drives (8 pins):


What laptop hard drives actually look like (4 pins):

 

Hello,
The jumpers on the 2.5 Drive are for factory use only. Go to Samsungs support site and download the ES tool (Dos CD bootable iso) Good for any Samsung drive.

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/support/downloads/support_in_es.html

There is also a patch but people have reported that it does not work.

http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/faqView.do?b2b_bbs_msg_id=126

 

You are a life safer!

It didn't occur to me that it would be implemented through firmware. Also I really appreciate baoth links, because as 'some people' complained, the patch did Not work for me. The same problem I had before returned when using the patch, so I booted up ESTool and analyzed the disk. It reported something very odd... I forget what it was exactly, but it was neither 150 nor 300.... I think it showed 62500 or something equally random. Anyways, I then used ESTool to restore the drive back to 3Gbps, and then switched it to 1.5Gbps. After doing that, the problem completely disappeared and the computer is now working perfectly.

Great advice yet again Tgell, and thanks for the fast reply.

 

Glad everything worked out for you and thanks for the feedback.