Norm Why wrote:
CMOS battery? Crazy idea, I know.

It took me all day to solve this problem. My Samsung SATA 2.0 boot drive
always work. The Barracuda SATA 3.0 SSD is finicky. I thought maybe a SATA
3.0 cable would work. Wrong. SATA 2.0 and SATA 3.0 are electrically
identical. The SATA 3.0 cable I tried had an elbow that made it
troublesome. SATA 2.0 cable is not.

I thought why is Barracuda SATA 3.0 SSD is finicky? Maybe bigshot does not
want to be slave. I rearranged the cables in the six available SATA ports.
Then I renamed drive E: to drive D: in Win10 and everything worked.

I ran CrystalDiskInfo and CrystalDiskMark and everything was fantastic.

Saved me a bundle of money not buying a new PC workstation. 12GB of RAM
works good.


I read that weak CMOS battery can prevent detection of a drive. I have two
SSD drives. One an old Samsung 500GB boots reliably. Drive D: is a new
Seagate Barracuda, 500GB that is not detected reliably. I've done
everything conceivable with the cables. I've read bad reviews on the
Barracuda.

BIOS program says CMOS battery is 3V whereas 3.3V might have been when it
was new.

Is it worth my time to buy a new CMOS battery?

Thanks

While the cables may be the same for all the standards,
the hardware driving the cable may not like the signals
or signal levels coming from the drive. Digital signals
do have their analog aspects. Eye opening and so on.

Some of the VIA Southbridge ports had their problems, in
that they didn't negotiate rate properly. And then any
prospective drives had to use "Force 150" to get them
to work. VIA eventually figured this out, so there
*is* some VIA product that works just fine. But there
will also be just a few museum pieces out there with
that flaw. Mine appears to be OK, but I haven't extensively
tested with SATA III drives to see if they all negotiate
properly to SATA I with that motherboard. The motherboard
is "retired", but is a viable option if the thing I'm
typing on ever dies.

The CMOS battery need drop to 2.3V before it's no longer
compliant with what is expected of it. 3.0V is still fine.
The Southbridge RTC is generally rated 2.0V plus you add
0.3V for the drop across the BAT54 schottky in the path.
A battery creating 2.3V, after diode drop, delivers 2.0V
to the Southbridge. And the RTC is supposed to run at
that low level.

If you've been cloning drives, you should use a good
software for it. Macrium Reflect Free will change
the identifiers on the partitions when it clones,
such that if a drive and its clone are plugged into
the same computer, there is no confusion about
which partition is which. Using "dd" isn't quite
the same, and requires manual intervention to prevent
one drive from entering the "Offline" state. Use
diskmgmt.msc (Disk Management) if a drive "disappears"
to see if its row is still present in Disk Management,
but the left-hand square is labeled "Offline". A number
of disk identifiers are allowed to be the same, but
there's at least one disk identifier that the OS
won't allow to be the same, and then the second
drive to be probed is put "Offline" for safety.

When Macrium clones, it also only transfers the occupied
clusters, which is like a "free TRIM" in a sense. "dd"
transfers from SSD to SSD would transfer all blocks,
which burns up a lot of the free pool on the destination,
and can benefit from issuing a TRIM per partition
in the Optimize panel later.

Paul