Sata backwards compatible?

[Dragoon42]

About to upgrade to first SATA drive. I never thought about it, but I know that they released new versions of the SATA drives. Is it backwards compatible with older sata controllers? Mobo is asus p4c800-e, onboard controller

 

[Lord Evermore]

SATA 3Gbps drives have a jumper to set which lets them run on SATA 1.5G boards. Hopefully they'll eliminate that eventually and as newer speeds are available. One of the features that was supposed to be great about SATA was not having to set jumpers, and we've never had to jumper IDE drives just to make them run on a slower controller.

 

[loafbred]

Some don't even use jumpers, and auto-detect. I put a new Western Digital 3.0 250GB drive in a relative's Abit NF7-S (nForce2, Silicone Image SATA 150 onboard controller). The drive had no jumpers and works great.