hi all, i am building my own system and have a question re compatibility ....
i will be using the Asustek ASUS A8N5X MB and a Maxtor DiamondMax10 250GB HDD ....question is :
the MB spec says its interface type is SATA 150 - the maxtor HDD spec says its interface type is SATA 300
does this mean it wont work with this MB ? do i need to have a HDD with a SATA 150 interface ? is it physically a different connector lead ? am confused ......... doesnt take much though lol
regards
craig

Read this post for some of the basics.

Although I don't think it specifically mentions it, SATA and SATA II are mechanically and protocol compatible, so both Hard Disk Drives and Controllers can negotiate a best speed.


edit:

actually, this is probably good background too.

nice one , thanks for that . I had searched the forum prior to posting and had read your detailed post but was a bit over my head . will i get significantly better performance if i match the mother board interface with the hdd interface .... so a mb with sata 300 with a hdd with sata 300 ?
many regards
craig

ps excellent forum .....

Syphus will have to correct me if this is wrong. As of right now, I don't think having such a high data transfer rate of those SATA devices is important. I have never seen or heard of a hard drive that has the capability of spitting out data at the insane speed of 300MBs per second. Somethin' around 50MB/s is more like it. The only real advantages that I see are a relatively small cable and overpassing the limitations of the original IDE (PATA). If I were you, I wouldn't worry too much about SATA vs. SATAII or the compatability between them. The devices will automatically figure out the correct speed.

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If you have any questions you can email me at zack.schmid@gmail.com.

As Schmidget says, SATA 300 is really a bit of a buzzword at the moment, and doesn’t do a great deal for performance. SATA II implies a feature set that implements several technological advantages that are not guaranteed in SATA/SATA 150, including hot-plug, which allows you to add and remove non-system disks while the system is running and Native Command Queuing (NCQ), which in my experience doesn’t do much for performance but seems to keep drivers cooler due to reduced actuator movement, and probably makes them last longer.

The limiting factor in HDDs is still the storage technology. While we continue to use platters and other mechanical parts, technology will creep along very slowly. The opportunity to fully utilize the high speed SATA interface is HDD cache access, which is why at present, cache seems to help performance quite a bit.