Gabriel said:
I bought a new Sata HDD and it didnt say on it if it was Sata2 or Sata3 I
found this web page about its specs and it seems to be Sata3 as it has 6Gb/s
but my mobo only has Sata2 at 3Gb/s will this drive be compatable with my
mobo? Will the HDD work at 3Gb/s? I am using a Gigabyte X48-DS5 mobo.
HDD specs here:
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...D&reqPage=Model#tTabContentSpecificationsMobo here:
http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=2766#spRegardsGK
The intention of the SATA standards committee, is that disks be backward
compatible. That means a SATA II motherboard can work with a SATA III disk.
A SATA I motherboard can work with a SATA III disk. A SATA III motherboard
would gear down to a SATA I rate, if talking to a SATA I disk.
They are supposed to negotiate to the highest possible common speed.
Just like, say, PCI Express.
In some cases, the chipset design is "epic fail", meaning that
design objective is not met. Examples are some of the VIA chipsets
or standalone controller chips, where the wrong thing happens
if a SATA II or SATA III disk is connected. In those cases,
the "Force 150" jumper on the hard drive, should be inserted,
to get the VIA motherboard or VIA controller card to work.
(On Hitachi drives, that feature is software controlled, and
no jumper is present on the drive.) The VT8237S Southbridge, has
that bug fixed (I have one and have tested it).
There are some complaints about SATA III and SSD drives (flash based).
So at the very highest transfer speeds, users seem to see a few
problems. But with rotating hard drives, they really can't transfer
data all that fast. The burst rate may be good (transfer to the RAM
chip on the hard drive controller board), but the sustained
rate is platter limited. (So in that sense, having SATA III on the
hard drive interface, is overkill. It really isn't needed or for
that matter, wanted. On an SSD disk, it would be a desirable feature.)
Can you imagine the number of tech support phone calls, if they
weren't backward compatible ?
The mind boggles...
Paul
