hey guys, i just purchased Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB SATA2 hard drive. my motherboard supports only SATA 1, i was wondering what exact cables i need to run the hard drive in my SATA 1 motherboard? can someone provide links to pictures of the cables so i clearly understand what i need. also, i understand that you need to put jumpers on the back of the HD to set it to SATA 1 speeds, when i get the HD, will it be pretty self explanitory? thanks a lot, quicky reply appreciated.

A SATA2 hard drive should plug into a SATA1 motherboard just fine without the need of extra cables or adjustments. You will just be getting SATA1 speeds instead of SATA2 speeds. Enermax 460W/33A PSU AMD Athlon64 3200+ @ 2.0GHZ MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum MB 2x 1GB Cosair PC3200 DDR400 Corsair Ram 120GB SATA Western Digital HD LG DVD-RW drive ATI Radeon X800XL 256m

thanks for your answer dude......also i had another question if you don't mind. i purchased this HD NOW: http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=18409&vpn=ST3320620AS&manufacture=Seagate&promoid=1056 and HAD this HD: http://www.us.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=13399&vpn=ST380817AS&manufacture=Seagate&nocookie=1&membership=0 my question is, even though the new HD is 320G(1st link)....it has the edge over my old 80G(2nd link) becuz of 16mb cache and that its a newer model 7200.10. will me having this HD with the operating system installed on this huge hard drive end up resulting in slower performance than my old 80G just because of its size? or will the speed of the new 320G increase peformance a little over the smaller one? thanks

If you bought this drive OEM from Newegg (nice price at the moment--I bought two last week), it will arrive already jumpered to SATA1 mode. As for the performance question, the 7200.10 should outperform the 7200.7 even though the 7200.7 isn't too shabby. In many cases larger-capacity drives are faster because their areal density (how closely-packed the sectors are) is higher than that of smaller drives. "If it ain't broke, upgrade anyway."

"You will just be getting SATA1 speeds instead of SATA2 speeds." No, the speed using that drive on a SATA1 mobo vs. a SATA2 mobo will be exactly the same. The "interface" speed is greater, but a SATA2 drive cannot even saturate a SATA1 interface. There are some very minor performance gains due to command queing and such, but not so much that it would ever be noticable. Michael J