Old MoBo and New HDD - Compatibility

cloud_dog

All you techno's out there any chance of some help.

My bruv PC is dieing a slow death. He wants to upgrade / buy a new one but finances are stretched (recently made redundant). I have an old BX Chaintech 6BTM MoBo, PII 700Mhz PC that I can build back up again with his parts to make a PC for the timebeing. My question.............

The MoBo supports DMA33 the slowest HDD nowadays quotes DMA100, i.e. Maxtor 40Gb. I know things tend to be compatable to the lowest denominator so, if I get the Maxtor 40Gb DMA 100 drive will it work with a MoBo running 33.

I appreciate speed will be sacrificed but these are desperate times. Was hoping to build it all back up for him this w/e so any fast responses would be welcome.

cloud_dog

LOOsenD

CDog,

You shouldn't have any problem in connecting up the 40Gb HD to PII M/board.
Upon boot up of Pc (with 40Gb HD installed), instead of seeing the IDE channel/device described as "ATA-100" or "ATA-133" you'll see it as "ATA-33"

Also, don't bother purchasing a PCI 133MHz IDE/RAID Controller. It will NOT make you HD run any quicker as these PCI cards rely upon having a m/board with 100/133MHz bus on it in the first place.

vultura

I can see no issues with running a newer (faster) drive on an old board, should be backwards compatible in most cases. Occassionally issues can be encountered and so some drive manufacturers have produced small utilities to control the drive speed.

There is also a slight chance of the board bios not being able to access a 40Gb drive, sometimes this is easily fixed with an updated bios.