[devper94]

Will a SATA 6 Gb/s drive work with a SATA 1.5 Gbit/s ports? Or must I use 3.0 Gbit/s drives? I want to reuse the drive later on, so I would be very happy if there is a way to make the drive work.

Also, do you have any drive recommendations? I want a reliable drive (i.e. isn't likely to fail) that is power-saving. Speed is not critical, but I will likely put it in a HDD box later on, so I want it to consume less power, so it will work with USB ports.

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Yes, it is backwards compatible though performance will be dictated by the slowest link.

As for reliability, I go for the major brands - Western Digital and Seagate and I look for the longer warranties. Most drives are warrantied for 3 years, I spend more and get the 5-year models.

Faster rotation speeds generally equate to better performance, and more heat generation. While most enclosures do fine with 7200 RPM drives, if concerned with heat, get a 5400 RPM drive. I would not run any games from it, but it will do nicely for storage or documents, tunes, and for backups.

[Digerati]

Yes, it is backwards compatible though performance will be dictated by the slowest link.

As for reliability, I go for the major brands - Western Digital and Seagate and I look for the longer warranties. Most drives are warrantied for 3 years, I spend more and get the 5-year models.

Faster rotation speeds generally equate to better performance, and more heat generation. While most enclosures do fine with 7200 RPM drives, if concerned with heat, get a 5400 RPM drive. I would not run any games from it, but it will do nicely for storage or documents, tunes, and for backups.

[devper94]

Thanks a lot for the recommendation, Digerati.

Although I won't be running games on my computer... it's an ancient one, and it can barely run games.

I have another question: Will it work together happily with an ATA drive?

[iammykyl]

Hi.

I would stick with a 3Gb/s HDD, they will work, with provisos. see below, but not sure about 6Gb/s drives. . A green drive will be OK for storage. What sort of size where you looking at?

"
According to the hard drive manufacturer Maxtor, motherboard host controllers using the VIA and SIS Chipsets VT8237, VT8237R, VT6420, VT6421L, SIS760, SIS964 found on the ECS 755-A2 manufactured in 2003, do not support SATA 3 Gbit/s drives. Additionally, these host controllers do not support SATA 3 Gbit/s optical disc drives. Users with a SATA 1.5 Gbit/s motherboard with one of the listed Chipsets should either buy an ordinary SATA 1.5 Gbit/s hard disk, buy a SATA 3 Gbit/s hard disk switchable to 1.5 Gbit/s, or buy a PCI or PCI-E card to add full SATA 3 Gbit/s capability and compatibility.

To address interoperability problems many manufacturers allow to switch drives to the SATA1 mode. The largest hard drive manufacturer, Seagate/Maxtor, has added a user-accessible jumper-switch known as the Force 150, to switch between 1.5 Gbit/s and 3 Gbit/s operation. Western Digital uses a jumper setting called OPT1 Enabled to force 1.5 Gbit/s data transfer speed (OPT1 is used by putting the jumper on pins 5 & 6). Samsung drives can be switched to 1.5 Gbit/s mode by using software downloadable from the manufacturer website. This needs a SATA2 controller to use temporarily while programming the drive.

The Force 150 switch is also useful when placing SATA 300 hard drives on SATA controllers on PCI cards, since many of these controllers (such as the Silicon Images chips) will run at SATA300 even though the PCI bus cannot even reach SATA150 speeds. This can cause data corruption in operating systems (IE: FreeBSD) that do not specifically test for this condition and limit the disk transfer "

[devper94]

I want about 500 GB to 1 TB, that is probably enough.

I have a ICH5 chipset, so I hope 6 Gb/s will work. I still want a 6 Gb/s drive, since I will be using it for a long time, probably with my new computer.

[Digerati]

Will it work together happily with an ATA drive?

If your motherboard has EIDE (also called IDE, PATA, ATA, UltraATA) support, then your SATA drive won't care. Your OS will just see another drive.