Questions on going from IDE to SATA

[Hardball]

The setup I have been using for 5+ years now consists of a Gigabyte GA-8INXP motherboard and a Western Digital WD1200JB 120 GB IDE drive. The WD drive is getting ready to tank on me and I was thinking of going SATA to replace the WD with. The Gigabyte motherboard is based on the Intel E7205 (Granite Bay) chipset with the ICH 4 (no SATA support) and has the Silicon Image SiL3112A chip onboard for 2 SATA ports. My questions are:

1. Will there be an issue getting one of the new/modern SATA-2 drives to work with the Sil3112A chip. That chip is for SATA-1 transfer rates of 1.5 GB as opposed to the current SATA-2 3GB speeds. Is it backwards compatible? I mean will a current SATA-2 hard drive work on my board, just at the slower speed of 1.5GB that the Silicon Image chip is rated for?

2. My GA-8INXP motherboard came with SATA cables and an adapter cable for the power lead that goes to an SATA drive. Will these SATA cables work with a SATA-2 hard drive? Are there specific cables for SATA-2 versus SATA-1? Will the same cable work for both?

Thanks in advance for any helpful replies.

 

[SlitheryDee]

My seagate HD has a jumper on the back that limits it to 1.5 gb/s for backwards compatibility. My Asus A8N5X also doesn't support 3gb/s transfer rates so I initially set the jumper to limit it, but fooling around with it later I ran the system for several days with the jumper set to 3 gb/s with no errors or noticeable difference in performance. Your situation may be different because the chipset you're using doesn't support SATA, but at least I can tell you that some 3gb/s drives offer a 1.5gb/s mode.

 

[Billb2]

The SATAI/SATAII specs are for buss data transfer rates, they have nothing to do with the speed of the HDD. The HDD will transfer data at the speeds the buss calls for, up to the physical limits of the drive.

It's like asking if your car, which can go only 65 mph on the highway, petal to the metal, will go faster if you drive on a road with a higher speed limit.

There are very few HDD setups that will reach the SATAI (1.5 Gb/sec.) speed spec, much less the SATAII spec. Not to worry.