Sata & Sata 2 Question

BadCharlie

My motherboard just has sata ports. If i plug a sata 2 HDD into it will it work ? Whats the differince between sata and sata2 ?

Explosive_Cornflake

There's about a thread every 3 weeks on this. No real difference from what I know, but in theory, SATA 1 is 150mb/s and sata2 is 300mb/s, but AFIAK, none of them get near that?
To your mother board, there is nor real difference, unlesss it's old, and usuallya VIA chipset. In that case there is a jumper on the back of the HD to set it to sata 1 mode.

ShiverinEskimo

I think the fastest a HDD can burst to is 80mb/s so it makes feck all of a difference. That's what I've picked up over the last 6 months anyways.

BadCharlie

Have an old MotherBoard all right Abit NF7-S V2 but if there is a jumper then i should have no problem.

Thanks

youcancallmeal

afaik you would only start to see benifits of sata2 hard drives if they were setup in a mulitple hd raid array

astrofool

I posted this in another thread on tweaking/modding, but hopefully its as relevant here (+ saves typing )

astrofool wrote:

ALOT of disinformation around here.

Right: Sata 2 and Sata 1 are backwards compatable, which means that in general, any motherboard with a SATA port will work with any HD with a SATA port, regardless of generation.

The problem occurs, and is mostly prevalent on early SATA motherboards, and early SATA controllers, which don't let the computer see the drive as a standard IDE drive, but usually as a drive attached to a SCSI controller with SATA ports. That Via board uses this method for sata hard drives, it also usually means you need to install a driver using a floppy disk when installing windows. Newer boards by Via and nVidia and just about every Intel board that has had SATA doesn't suffer from these problems.

The other problem is these add in type controllers are often not forward compatable with SATA2, probably due to the way they implement SATA support (i.e. not as a standard IDE device). In this situation you can usually jumper the hard drive so that it is seen as a standard SATA 1 device and then it should work.

You also have to make sure that the SATA ports aren't set to RAID mode in the bios if you're not raid'ing them (obviously), but unless the SATA ports are disabled in the bios, raid mode or not, it should at least detect the drive and show it is there, either in the standard bios, or the raid config bios.

So in summary, check the web for information on how to jumper the drive to SATA 1 and you should be ok.

CatInABox

VIA chipsets wont even recognise a SATA-II drive if it doesnt support it. Setting the jumper on the hard drive to SATA-I will fix this, but some hard drives (namely the WD drives I just bought) dont ship with jumpers. Luckily, I had two dead hard drives with jumpers.

Explosive_Cornflake

I'm not sure if that's entirely true. My current mobo, Abit IC7 G, has 4 ports, controlled from two different chipsets. One of the chipsets allows sata port 1 & 2 to act as IDE channel 3 & 4. Sata ports 3 & 4, are on a different chipset, so they don't allow you. They appear as SCSI devices. I current have a mix of IDE, sata 1, and sata 2 drives. The sata 2 drives works fine on the scsi appearing port.
I get what you are saying though. It's not a huge issue. Generally it's just the jumpers thing.

Astrofool wrote:

ALOT of disinformation around here.

Right: Sata 2 and Sata 1 are backwards compatable, which means that in general, any motherboard with a SATA port will work with any HD with a SATA port, regardless of generation.

The problem occurs, and is mostly prevalent on early SATA motherboards, and early SATA controllers, which don't let the computer see the drive as a standard IDE drive, but usually as a drive attached to a SCSI controller with SATA ports. That Via board uses this method for sata hard drives, it also usually means you need to install a driver using a floppy disk when installing windows. Newer boards by Via and nVidia and just about every Intel board that has had SATA doesn't suffer from these problems.

The other problem is these add in type controllers are often not forward compatable with SATA2, probably due to the way they implement SATA support (i.e. not as a standard IDE device). In this situation you can usually jumper the hard drive so that it is seen as a standard SATA 1 device and then it should work.

You also have to make sure that the SATA ports aren't set to RAID mode in the bios if you're not raid'ing them (obviously), but unless the SATA ports are disabled in the bios, raid mode or not, it should at least detect the drive and show it is there, either in the standard bios, or the raid config bios.

So in summary, check the web for information on how to jumper the drive to SATA 1 and you should be ok.