Will my 6.5 y.o. computer handle new drives?

  • Thread starter Thread starter mm
  • Start date Start date
M

mm

All the SATA drives now seem to be SATA 3 Gb/s or higher.

My Dell Inspiron 4600 without a hard drive that a friend gave me was
sold in January 2004.

It's new enough to use curreent SATA drives, right?

I hope.

If not I guess I can find an older drive.



(I looked online and even wikip didn't give dates for the change to
SATA 2. I did see a question from Dec. 2005 about this, but no answer
to it anyhow.)
 
I should have included that the original hd was

120G, I, 8M, 7.2K, SATA, Seagate-Alpine

according to the on-line Dell record for this specific computer!

Maybe that gives a clue as to what hd's it can use now.
 
mm said:
I should have included that the original hd was
Yep.

120G, I, 8M, 7.2K, SATA, Seagate-Alpine
Click to expand...
according to the on-line Dell record for this specific computer!
Click to expand...
Maybe that gives a clue as to what hd's it can use now.
Click to expand...

Yep, any current SATA drive should be fine.


It clearly is because it had a SATA drive in originally.

You wont need to.

There is no nice tidy date, it varys with the manufacturer.
 
mm said:
I should have included that the original hd was
120G, I, 8M, 7.2K, SATA, Seagate-Alpine
according to the on-line Dell record for this specific computer!
Click to expand...

So it has SATA in some form. Good.
Maybe that gives a clue as to what hd's it can use now.
Click to expand...

Any SATA HDD really. There were some incompatibilities
with early SATA 2 disks and controllers, but these disks can
be jumpered back to SATA1.

Don't worry, SATA is reasonably well designed, basically any
controller (1/2/3) can talk with any modern drive.

Arno
 
Arno said:
Don't worry, SATA is reasonably well designed, basically any
controller (1/2/3) can talk with any modern drive.
Click to expand...

Basically any controller that's not an old one from SiS or VIA, and a
lot of PCI cards made with the VIA ones (VT6421x chip) are still sold.
 
All the SATA drives now seem to be SATA 3 Gb/s or higher.

My Dell Inspiron 4600 without a hard drive that a friend gave me was
sold in January 2004.

It's new enough to use current SATA drives, right?  

I hope.  

If not I guess I can find an older drive.

(I looked online and even wikip didn't give dates for the change to
SATA 2.  I did see a question from Dec. 2005 about this, but no answer
to it anyhow.)
Click to expand...

I have a Dell Optiplex GX270 with an almost identical Intel chipset,
and it's worked fine with every 300MB/s SATA drive I've tried with
it. Even though this chipset can't run faster than 150MB/s, Intel
implemented it correctly, and AFAIK the only 150MB/s SATA chipsets
that don't work right with newer drives were from VIA (VT6421x used
mostly on plug-in cards, VT8237x for motherboards, except the VT8237s)
and SiS. If you ever need to buy a PCI SATA card, stick with
something based on a chip from Silicon Image or Promise.
 
I have a Dell Optiplex GX270 with an almost identical Intel chipset,
and it's worked fine with every 300MB/s SATA drive I've tried with
it. Even though this chipset can't run faster than 150MB/s, Intel
implemented it correctly, and AFAIK the only 150MB/s SATA chipsets
that don't work right with newer drives were from VIA (VT6421x used
mostly on plug-in cards, VT8237x for motherboards, except the VT8237s)
and SiS. If you ever need to buy a PCI SATA card, stick with
something based on a chip from Silicon Image or Promise.
Click to expand...

It is conceivable that I'll have to do this, so, Thanks. Well, ewve
if it were not conceivable.
 
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