SATAII HDD and KT880

[rsfnatik]

Looking at buying a SATA drive for an Athlon system based on an ASUS A7V880 board (VIA KT880). The controller on the board is SATA-1, but I may end up with a SATA-2 drive... should I expect any problems? I've come across a few threads on other forums that (vaugely) discussed some SATA-2 compatibility issues. From my understanding, the technology is backwards compatible...

[Midknyte]

SATAII drives are backwards compatible to SATAI controllers. You shouldn't have problems. If anything, you might want to do a bios update on your board.

[Peter M]

No they're not.

Some SATA-II drives, in particular those that support double interface speed mode (3 Gbit/s), expect the host end to perform a link speed negotiation. Obviously, SATA-I host interfaces don't do that, and hence, the drive won't run.

Most such drives have a jumper that hardwires them to standard interface speed (1.5 Gb/s), making them skip the speed negotiation. This makes them work on SATA-I hosts.

[Midknyte]

Interesting. I've run some of the seagate SATAII drives on SATAI without changing jumpers. but the bottomline is there is a way to make it work.

[Peter M]

With those SATA-II drives that do NOT implement 3 Gb/s interface (remember this is an OPTIONAL feature of SATA-II), and with those that do AND have a jumper to disable it, it'll work.

With those few that do have 3 Gb/s and no force-1.5-Gb/s jumper, it won't.