SATA II Hard Drive Blues...

I have killed so many computers messing with the hard drive configurations over my lifetime that it should be illegal for me to even touch my computer with a screwdriver.  But, like Mr. Anderson of the Matrix, I persist because "I choose to"...

So I have an HP Pavilion DV9000 laptop with two Toshiba MK1237GSX 120 GB SATA hard drives factory installed. I wanted to upgrade the secondary drive to a Samsung HM500LI 500 GB hard drive. I installed the drive and the system eventually came up after 5 mins of some kind of internal existential struggle... ;^) Unfortunately in that struggle, the hard drive lost, and was nowhere to be found, not even after asking the computer to scan for new devices...

After a few internet searches I learned that my new drive was SATA II and was somehow not being recognized by the system at all. Perhaps because my computer's primary drive was SATA I?  Anyway, Samsung's website references the possibility of jumpering the drive to halve the throughput from 3 GB/sec to 1.5 GB/sec, but does not actually show how the jumpers are supposed to be placed. (What the heck is wrong with these people??)  Ultimately my solution was to jumper the device by trial and error, with this drive the jumper was correctly placed when it was connecting the outer-edge-most two of the 4 jumper pins. Once the jumper was installed, the disk came up and was immediately recognized by the system.

Actually I can't really see any performance difference between this drive and the other drive running at native speed.  Perhaps the fact that the drive is only spinning at 5400 rpm is the more limiting factor.