SATA 150 and SATA 2 Hardf Drive Compatibility

fatnbald

Hello Tech Heads!

I have a Abit UL8 Motherboard in my PC and I need to stick a new main hard drive in it, currently I have IDE HD's in it but they are becoming a little full.

The motherboard is designed to have SATA 150 drives, many of the drives now available are however SATA 300, I know there is an option to set Seagate Barracuda drives to run at the previous spec by the way of a jumper but do all SATA 300 drives have this backwards compatibility?

Thanks folks

savemoney

Yes they should be backward compatible in theory at least

just found this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA


Backward compatibility between SATA 1.5 Gbit/s controllers and SATA 3.0 Gbit/s devices was important, so SATA/300's autonegotiation sequence is designed to fall back to SATA/150 speed (1.5 Gbit/s rate) when in communication with such devices. In practice, some older SATA controllers do not properly implement SATA speed negotiation. Affected systems require the user to set the SATA 3.0 Gbit/s peripherals to 1.5 Gbit/s mode, generally through the use of a jumper[5], however some drives lack this jumper. Chipsets known to have this fault include the VIA VT8237 and VT8237R south bridges, and the VIA VT6420 and VT6421L standalone SATA controllers.[6] SiS's 760 and 964 chipsets also initially exhibited this problem, though it can be rectified with an updated SATA controller ROM.I][URL="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed"]citation needed[/URL][/I
This table shows the real speed of SATA 1.5 Gbit/s and SATA 3 Gbit/s - note the bottom row shows megabytes per second (MB/s, not Mbit/s):

almillar

Yup, only difference is the speed of the connection. Many SATA drives can't even get up to the 150 max of SATA1, never mind the 300 of SATA2, so not too much of a problem...

mdbarber

no i'm afraid from experience the above is not true, many sata 300 drives will not be recognised by the bios, just buy the seagates, the jumper system has always worked best

almillar

Cool, every day's a school day. Another case of technology not doing what it should!

Antispam

Well I have a new PC and its uses 1 sata 150 and 1 sata 2 1TB HD on my ASUS PRO board which I built at weekend so it does work, it may just depend on your hardware. Possibly if you have issues perhaps they may be a bios fix or driver update for the OS

mdbarber

Antispam wrote: »

Well I have a new PC and its uses 1 sata 150 and 1 sata 2 1TB HD on my ASUS PRO board which I built at weekend so it does work, it may just depend on your hardware. Possibly if you have issues perhaps they may be a bios fix or driver update for the OS

err?, think you are going the wrong way sata 300 controllers can use 150 drives but most 150 controllers can't use 300 drives
Yours is a new PC so it has a 300 controller on it.

Antispam

Yes I stand corrected from that post.

However I am still had the sata 150 (320gb) and sata 300 (500gb) in another pc before I built a new one and then replaced one of them for a TB HD and kept the 500gb in a new Asus mobo. It worked fine in my Gigabyte GA-965P-DS4 V1.0 (latest bios) which is almost 2 years old now

You could get a sata pci card to solve the problem

mdbarber wrote: »

err?, think you are going the wrong way sata 300 controllers can use 150 drives but most 150 controllers can't use 300 drives
Yours is a new PC so it has a 300 controller on it.