SATA compatibilty question

[Rambongo]

I mistakenly purchased SATA 2 drives when my MB controller is SATA. Are SATA2 drives backward compatible with a standard SATA controller?

Thanks!

 

[Mondoman]

Technically, it's not called SATA 2 (or SATA II) - just call it SATA 3Gb/s vs SATA 1.5Gb/s.
In any case, your drive should work fine. In a small number of cases, there might be some difficulty -- in these cases, the solution is to set the drive to operate only at the 1.5Gb/s speed. For some drives, this involves a jumper, for others it involves running a software utility.

 

[misry]

If your drive has a jumper to throttle it back, use it. Every time I've tried to ignore it some of the additional features would throw a wrench in something somewhere and I'd have to do a free repeater. If it doesn't have a jumper and is > than 160G it probably has auto detect and you are good to go.