VIA 8237 Southbridge and 2TB HDD

I recently bought a 2TB Drive (WD Greenie) and threw it in my system to replace a 320gb WD drive. To my surprise it seems to be incompatible with this MB (Asus K8V SE Deluxe) or perhaps, South-bridge (VIA 8237).

The board has a promise 378 chip, which runs off the PCI bus and provides 2 SATA ports. It also has a VIA Raid built into the south bridge that provides another 2 SATA ports.
There are two PATA ports off the southbridge which I have my boot drive and dvdrw drive on.

So just to explain my setup:
-Southbridge

IDE1 - 20gb Boot Drive
IDE1:S - DVD-RW
IDE2 - Empty
IDE2:S - Empty
SATA1 - 320gb
SATA2 - 2TB​

-PCI BUS

SATA Primary - 1TB
SATA Secondary - 1TB​

If I plug the 2TB drive into the 378 chip, windows can play with the new drive without a problem. However, the VIA SATA ports are then disabled, and the VIA controller bios does not run on boot (it just doesn't come up at all).

If I plug the 2TB drive into the VIA chip, the second drive connected to the VIA chip (a 320gb WD) is detected in the VIA bios and the 2TB is not. However the 320gb drive does not appear in windows disk management at all.

If I unplug the new drive, everything works fine. I can plug in another drive to replace the 2TB and everything works fine.

Somehow the VIA raid controller doesn't like the 2TB drive at all. I'm just a bit confused because I wasn't aware that fairly modern sata controllers would have this limitation.

 

try forcing it to 1.5gbps (the jumper)

 

Jesus, I threw the jumper on and bingo, it's working great.

Your a bloody legend mate, I had no idea the drive wouldn't auto-select a compatible speed. I didn't even think of the speed issue.

Thanks a million. Case closed.

 

the drive does not negotiate the link speed, its the controller which does that.

im glad the problems solved!

 

Yeah, I think the 1.5Gbps limiter was created specifically for VIA chipsets (and SIS?) because the backwards compatibility didn't seem to work for these chipsets (they'd play up using 3Gbps drives). Theoretically (and in most real cases), SATA standards are meant to be completely backwards compatible.

 

It was Via chipsets, particularly the first few generations for A64s.

Every other chipset is fine. I've got a few old Intel systems here (i865/ICH5 chipset) and they're fine with SATA2 HDDs (without changing the jumper).

 

Yeah, I have a freebie HP with a 2.8Ghz Prescott in it and it didn't complain when my 500Gb SATA drive was in it and it was an i865G with ICH5 as well.