sata 2 compatible with my old board?

firestrike · 23 Oct 2008 at 23:02

So I have currently got an old Asus a8n-e motherboard which I believe just sata compatible. I would like to add a new 1tb drive for storage and back up purposes, to tie me over till I buy a whole new system. Obviously the new drive is going to be sata2. My question is am I going to have any compatibility problems with this configuration?

Hard drive wise I have about £80 to spend so I guess I would be looking at either the Samsung or the Seagate?

thanks for any help you can give me.

ajm · 24 Oct 2008 at 09:27

Although i don't have that same mobo, i do have 2 pc's that are sata 1 and are running fine on sata II drives (both samsung). One board which is an asus

jbloggs · 24 Oct 2008 at 10:26

firestrike said:
So I have currently got an old Asus a8n-e motherboard which I believe just sata compatible. I would like to add a new 1tb drive for storage and back up purposes, to tie me over till I buy a whole new system. Obviously the new drive is going to be sata2. My question is am I going to have any compatibility problems with this configuration?

Hard drive wise I have about £80 to spend so I guess I would be looking at either the Samsung or the Seagate?

thanks for any help you can give me.

The Seagate 7200.10/11s usually come with a small jumper to change from SATAII to SATAI, quite simple to do, on the Samsung you have to use a "tool" to change it (the F1s anyway), and it is not always successful to run on a SATAI only mobo (from what I have read around the internet, but "ajm" seems to have had no problem with the Samsungs). I have an old Dell OptiPlex GX270 (Intel P856x chipset) with one SATAI port, and a WD 500GB AAKS runs fine on it, obviously in SATAI mode, but no decrease in performance.

So, you might find the Seagate is a better bet to be sure of running on a SATAI only mobo, I'm sure others will have a different opinion....

rpstewart · 24 Oct 2008 at 10:30

I'd go with the Seagate too.

The Samsung tool will only run if the drive is recognised by the controller and if the drive is recognised by the controller then you don't need to run the tool. If the drive isn't recognised then you need to run the tool but can't because it won't find the drive :confused: