ESATA speed still busted on 1340. Apple updated their support, whadabout dell?

Does anyone have ESATA working fully on this laptop at 3.0gbps? I thought I did but it turned out it would only work for small file transfers. Anything more than a few hundred MB would cause disk I/O errors. I know that per the old ESATA thread http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=348270 most users worked around this problem by setting the enclosure or disk drive to limit the speed to 1.5gbps. But I currently have an external mobile disk that doesn't let me jumper the limit (the western digital scorpio black wd3200bekt).

I contacted dell support on this a couple times now but they have no information.

Contrast this to Apple who just had an SATA speed problem with this very same chipset in their macbooks and they fixed it in about a week after the news broke:
http://www.anandtech.com/mac/showdoc.aspx?i=3582&p=2
with the fix:
http://support.apple.com/downloads/MacBook_Pro_EFI_Firmware_Update_1_7_

Now apple was able to fix SATA performance at 3.0gbps with a firmware update. Where's the equivalent fix from dell??

I do note that Apple seems to be using the newer b2 revision of the mcp79mx chipset. Photo from a teardown:
http://s1.guide-images.ifixit.com/igi/3RPYoFODOXppgooX.large
and dell only makes note of the b2 revision in the A08 BIOS release notes. Apparently dell has been shipping the older b1 chips until now.

I sure hope I don't need to get my system board replaced to get fully functional esata.

 

Anyone yet have a system with b2 version of the system board (as reported by cpu-z)?

 

I don't know if that determines the revision number. CPU-Z reports my SXPS 13 as revision B1 while the chip says B2. See the pictures below.

Chip: http://yfrog.com/6735228752j
CPU-Z: http://yfrog.com/67cpuzb01p

Edit: I have no clue about the ESATA stuff though, since I've never used it. Also just noticed that the apple one is MCP79MXT while mine is MCP79MX so maybe they're different?

 

So that pic of the chip is before you re-applied the thermal paste? Darn, I had hoped cpu-z was showing the right info. I do note that on my machine lspci under linux shows all the mcp79 components as rev b1 except for the LPC bridge which shows as rev b2.

Yes, confusing. I haven't found any datasheets that detail these part #s, just marketing specs.

With the lack of response from Dell on the ESATA problem I'm left inferring what is wrong. I don't think it bodes well that Apple temporarily limited their SATA to 1.5gbps and then put it back to 3.0gpbs after public pressure with the caveat that it might not work. This article:
http://www.computerworld.com/action...leBasic&articleId=9134529&intsrc=news_ts_head
speculates that the change was done on purpose due to SATA problems.

 

So I replaced my entire system board and the ESATA cable assembly, and with the new hardware, ESATA still fails at 3.0gbps. It actually fails a bit more reliably now - drives are usually completely ignored unless jumpered to 1.5gbps. Windows and BIOS will still sometimes hang when an ESATA drive is attached at 3.0gbps however.

After looking at the way the ESATA cable assembly attaches internally, I'm not surprised there are problems. The internal SATA connector barely fastens to the mainboard as it has to reach over the power connector which sticks up about twice as high on the pcb board. Then there's about 6" of cable before you get to the ESATA connector, and that cable doesn't seem to be shielded, and it runs parallel with the notebook's power wires.