Current HD is SATA, can SATA-II be used?

My current Hard drive is an 5400rpm 100gb sata default, and i want to upgrade it to an 7200rpm hard drive but with over 200gb of space. Is SATA-II compatible before i go and buy HD that doesn't work for me?

My laptop is in the sig.

Thanks for any replies.

tofu

 

Sata = Sata 150Mbps
SataII = Sata 300Mbps

same connector. don't worry about it. It will work.

 

Yes. You can use a SATA2 drive. SATA2 is backwards compatible with SATA1.

The SATA2 HDD you'll install will operate in SATA1 mode.

 

It will work. No mechanical laptop harddrive can max out the SATA I bus, so no performance drop will result when using a SATA II drive.

K-TRON

 

Wow in a space of 12 minutes i get many replies, thanks everyone! Useful and helpful posts from you all!

il try and give rep all =p haha

I shall try and go for 320gb 7200rpm hd if i do get me grant for 'studying'

tofu

 

It will work. As a matter of fact, most SATA-II drives come with a jumper set to specifically enable SATA-I compatability.

 

u might aswell enable sata I .. because the wd3200bekt cannot max its bandwidth out anyway... and sata I consumes slightly less power from what i've heard

 

But the burst rate from the cache may max out SATA1 bandwith I believe, so it may help to put it in SATA2.

 

I haven't seen a hdtune pic of a wd3200bekt with a burst rate higher that 120mb/s.... i don't think very many people would reach the 150mb/s limit imposed by sata I.

 

I'm not sure if HDTune is a good benchmark to measure the readspeed from cache.

If the normal read speed from a platter comes close to 90MB/sec, I would expect the speed from cache to easily exceed 120MB/sec.

 

word

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So i would just set the new hard drive to SATA-I? or just leave it as SATA-II if thats the default setting?

tofu

 

Set it to whatever you like. Its not going to affect performance in anyway whatsoever.

And just for the record, the WD3200BEKT does not have a jumper setting for force-enabling SATA1, but the Seagate 7200.3 does.

Anyway, for a drive to even operate in SATA mode, you would need AHCI enabled on your notebook.

(And the ICH7/8-M controllers have been rumored not to operate in true SATA-mode. I don't know how true this is for the ICH7M controller, but this definitely happens in the ICH8M controller)

 

I agree. Not noticeably, anyway.

Good to know. Makes sense, I suppose. It never struck me as an industry standard.

Thanks, I did not realize that. The one time I've tried enabling AHCI mode for my hard drives, Windows failed to see the drives. I realize I could have provided the driver during install, but I've not had to do that before now (well, once years ago, when I was using SCSI drives). I ended up just leaving it disabled this time and not worrying about it. I'm sure the geek community will be knocking on my door soon to confiscate my membership card.

What do you mean by "true SATA-mode"? Any idea what sort of differences are there between the two?

 

There are methods of enabling AHCI on Vista and XP, after installation, but enabling AHCI doesn't provide a noticeable boost in performance. The fastest drive - 7200.3 operates the same in ATA-133.

The Mobile versions of the ICH7 and ICH8 have integrated IDE controllers as well. I don't know much about the ICH7, since the ICH7 offered options of both IDE and SATA ports for HDDs, so one of the ports could be disabled.

But in the ICH8, for some reason the IDE port is not disabled.
ICH8M/M-E only supports SATA drives, with the IDE port enabled.

In every Santa-Rosa notebook --> Device Manager > IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers > There will be an IDE controller + SATA controller. That active IDE controller causes the SATA device connected to operate in Legacy mode, hence causing it to have data transfer rates equal to Ultra-ATA 100/133 depending upon the drive.