SATA vs SATA II

[k3wkm]

My Asus P4P800 Deluxe will support 2 SATA drives....I want to buy a new drive but I see SATA...SATA150...SATA II. My question is are all these varieties backward compatible. I've assumed SATA II is the latest. I just want to make sure what I buy will work in my MB. Thanks for any help!

 

[emogoch]

SATA was the first standard that was released. It quoted for a maximum bandwidth of 150Gb/s. With the release of SATA2 or SATAII depending on where you read, that maximum bandwidth was expanded to 300Gb/s, hence why you sometimes see SATA150 now. Note that SATA2 also calls for the support of additional features, such as Native Command Queuing (NCQ). However, not all features have to be implemented for it to be considered SATA2 compliant. Tom's has a decent article about it all somewhere, but I can't seem to find it :frown: .

SATA2 ports are backwards compatable with SATA150 drives. I don't know if the reverse is true though.

 

[k3wkm]

Thanks for the quick response and update..from what you are telling me, seems like I could buy any of the versions of SATA HD and it would work in my MB. Issue may be that I can't take advantage of SATA II capability. Do you know are the transfer speeds bios or chip related? That would probably be my limiting factor. Do you see it the same way?
Thanks again for the help!

 

[emogoch]

Brief research says it does appear that SATAII drives can be used with SATA150 ports. However, <A HREF="http://forums.storagereview.net/index.php?showtopic=20463" target="_new">here</A> they suggest that there may be some incompatibility issues. Transfer speeds are chipset related. Don't know that there's much else that I can tell you. Have paid more attention these days to GPUs and CPUs than HDDs.

 

[emogoch]

Whoops. My bad. It wasn't Tom's that had the article. It was <A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2450" target="_new">Anandtech</A>.

 

[Crashman]

Yes, they work together. In fact, some SATAII controllers have been forced backwards to SATA 150 transfers, using nVidia's nForce4 standard chipset as an example.

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