I've been running my E6420 with a standard Hitachi 7k RPM disk for over a year with no problems. For reference the disk's label shows SATA 3Gb/s (i.e. SATA2).
I recently got a Corsair Neutron GTX SSD, which of course supports SATA3. When installing into my E6420's internal SATA bay, the BIOS usually doesn't recognize the disk at all, although sometimes the BIOS sees it, but then Windows 7 won't boot with various "I/O error" and/or "general read error" and/or "missing bootmgr" messages.
Interestingly, if I put the SSD into an eSATA enclosure, the SSD is consistently identified correctly in BIOS, and Windows 7 installs and boots quite nicely, although at the slow speeds of the eSATA port.
Now... Before we point to the drive being bad, I installed the SSD into a desktop that has a SATA3 port, and the SSD ran flawlessly at full speed.
So, it appears NOT to be a problem with the drive.
That said, it's still a weird situation that, apparently, my E6420's internal SATA bay is quite happy driving a Hitachi 7k RPM disk at SATA2 speeds, but is having problems with a SATA3 SSD.
Any ideas? Is there any way to control the internal SATA bay, and maybe force it to SATA3 or SATA2 mode? I'm assuming all that should be automatic...
Thanks!
