Hard drisk drive jumper - advice needed

[Confused_Chimp]

Have just bought a 500 GB Seagate Barracuda SATA2 7200rpm 16MB cache HDD. Next to the power connector and sata connector is a jumper and the instruction on the hard drive state it selects the maximum transfer rate. If the jumper is on it limits the drive to 1.5gbs, and if its off its maximum is 3gbs.

I'm wondering why this jumper is there? Can windows XP pro or other OS's not handle drives with transfer speeds any higher than 1.5gbs?
Running XP pro 32 bit and want to know if there is any reason that I should leave the jumper on?
Cheers
CC

 

[Mondoman]

It's just there because the SATA standard was increased to a 3.0Gb/s transfer rate. Some older (1.5 Gb/s) controllers run into trouble recognizing the newer drives, so you can jumper a newer drive so it just acts like a 1.5Gb/s drive.