SATA-300 drives on SATA-150 controllers?

drwook · Veteran Joined: 30 Mar 2005 Posts: 1324 Location: London

Stupid question time from someone who pays too little attention to desktop hardware

My main desktop's got two 80Gb IDE drives, and I really need to add some more storage.

The machine's got a VIA VT6420 SATA RAID Controller on the mobo, which has so far just sat there. So, "I guess I'll grab a 250Gb SATA drive and throw that in" I say to myself. Then I stared at a few price lists and decided on a drive, & realised it was SATA-300.

So, if I get it I'm hoping it'll just 'fall back' to operating as SATA-150? Or do I need to get a SATA-150 drive?

2nd I presume £52.58 is pretty good for a 250Gb WD drive with 16Mb of cache? But if someone knows a better buy let me know

teidon · Posted: Sun Jul 16, 2006 2:38 pm Post subject:

SATA-300 devices does work on SATA-150 controllers.

As a "better buy" suggestion, buy 2 instead of 1.

Depending on the capacity of disk, buying 2 disks of half the capacity might be cheaper or the same price as 1 big disk. Then just put them on RAID-0 and you'll get as much storage capacity as with one disk, but read/write speeds of the RAID-0 setup is better. How much better... no idea.

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drwook · Veteran Joined: 30 Mar 2005 Posts: 1324 Location: London

Heh, well the price point looks good(~21p a gig! Think that's about 33 US cents), & I've already got 4 IDE drives in the system so adding 2 SATA's might strain the PSU a little

Might RAID-0 the IDE's for a bit of fun. But I wouldn't want RAID-0 for any valuable data, as you double the chance of failure. Either that or RAID-1 for the stuff I need to keep...

Sachankara

The VIA controllers have problems auto detecting the correct speed if the drives are SATA-300, so you'll most likely have to add a jumper to each of the drives to make them work. Look at the manufacturer's (the harddisk manufacturer) homepage for instructions on how to do that.
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michel7 · Guru Joined: 04 May 2006 Posts: 461 Location: localhost

Im using sata2 drive on sata1 nforce controller. Working well, but you have to set jumper on hdd for compability mode ...
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Ast0r · Posted: Mon Jul 17, 2006 6:54 am Post subject:

teidon · Posted: Mon Jul 17, 2006 7:43 am Post subject:

Ast0r · Posted: Mon Jul 17, 2006 7:48 am Post subject:

Dieter@be · Posted: Mon Jul 17, 2006 8:00 am Post subject:

watch out though! there are known (and very serious, still unresolved) compatibility problems with sata1 controllers such as the controllers included in nforce5 chipsets, some generic Silicon Image chips (iirc the 311* series), some promise controllers, LSI cards (like the megaraid 150-6) with hard drives such as maxtor diamondmax and maxlines (there are reports of other brands too)

the problem here is the very strict (but correct) implementation of pin11 on the hard drives : the staggered spin-up feature, while many controllers (mentioned above) don't implement this correctly, which causes data corruption
even setting the sata150mode on these drives does often not work, nor flashing a new firmware. in fact many sata1 (sata150) drives from maxtor even suffer this problem (as they already have this feature enabled)
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