I was in the market for a new HD, and I had a few questions. I know my mobo (gigabyte GA 8IK-1100) supports SATA with it's 1.5gb/s transfer speed (that's what my current harddrive has). I was wondering, if I bought a new HD with SATAII (3.0gb/s transfer speed): a) would it work at all with my mobo? b) would i reap the benefits of the higher transfer speed, or would it be stuck at 1.5gb/s? thanks.

a) Yes b) No, but it doesn't matter because you cannot reap the benefits of SATA1 either This has been said time and again, but I guess it needs to be said again. THE BANDWIDTH OF THE INTERFACE DOES NOT DETERMINE THE SPEED OF THE DRIVE!!! Just because SATA 1 supports a (hypothetical) bandwidth of 150MB/s doesn't mean that the drive can fill that bandwidth. SATA drive are physically identical to their PATA counterparts and have the exact same speed. There are some very minor benefits with regard to system overhead, but not such that you would ever actually notice. Drive today top out somewhere around 80MB/s. So, why the higher bandwidth of the bus? Marketing is one. People hear that the interface is twice as fast o that must be good, right? No. But, there are some real benefits. The SATA2 allows for external connections of up to five drives on a single channel. 5 drives x 80MB/s = 400MB/s. And since all drives would not be operating at maximum throughput at the same time 300MB/s would be about right. Michael J

The only thing that really matters in a hard drive is the the amound of MB's on them. AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ 2GB Dual Channel DDR 3200 Nvidia 7800GT SATA II 2x 200gig 7200rpm 16mb cache RAID-0 Gigabyte Nforce 4 SLI

I was following another thread concerning this issue and I think that with the current technology, SATA and SATA II HDDs don't offer significant performance advantages over 7200 RPM 8MB buffer IDE HDDs. If I were you, I'd get an inexpensive IDE HDD.

"would it work at all with my mobo?" Maybe, maybe not. Very recent mboard chipsets on mboards that have SATA but not SATA 2 may recognize the drive and the drive will work at SATA specs, but many older chipsets require there be a jumper to SATA on the drive. E.G. A WD SATA 2 drive auto detects whether the mboard supports SATA or SATA 2 and auto sets itself, but this specifies some chipsets that can't detect a SATA 2 drive. http://www.lifecomputers.co.il/uploadFiles/632680753562968750115.pdf You can add the ATI RS480 / RS482M mboard chipsets to that list - I installed a MSI mboard about a month ago and it couldn't detect a SATA 2 drive automatically. If your mboard has a chipset that can't recognize a SATA 2 drive and set it to SATA specs automatically, in order to use a SATA 2 drive on a mboard that has only SATA capability the SATA 2 drive has to have a jumper position available on it such that a jumper can be installed to limit the drive to SATA specs and a max 150mb/sec data transfer rate - if you don't install the jumper, the mboard will not be able to recognize the SATA 2 drive. Some SATA 2 drives have that jumper position available (e.g. some current Samsung), some do not (e.g. some Maxtor). Therefore, if you want to be sure the SATA drive will work for sure, get one that has the jumper position available. "would i reap the benefits of the higher transfer speed..." See this recent post/thread: http://www.computing.net/hardware/wwwboard/forum/42725.html

Sata is really beneficial if you are doing something like video editing and you really only see a significant benefit if you have two together in a Raid0 configuration. Asus K8V-X Athlon 64 2800+ ATI AIW 9600XT 512 PC3200 WD 80 GIG HP CD-RW LG DVD Send me your unwanted computer parts!

FYI: I asked a similar question previously, and got some very detail answer here http://www.computing.net/hardware/wwwboard/forum/42725.html