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I have an older computer with a SATA-I connection. My hard drive crashed and I need to buy a new hard drive. Will I run into problems if I connect a SATA-II drive to my computer?

quack quixote
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Michael Keeling
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1 Answers1

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Yes, SATA-II is backwards-compatible. You'll only be able to use SATA-I bandwidth (150 MB/s), but since that is well above what normal hard drives deliver, that shouldn't be a problem.

mmarx
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  • that's what i thought too, but i've got recent Seagate SATA-II drives that aren't playing nice with my onboard SATA-I controller. no jumpers to force it either. could be a bios config issue, i gave up and put them on an internal sataII controller. – quack quixote Oct 07 '09 at 01:37
  • I finally got everything connected up about a week ago and it worked like a champ, no problems. – Michael Keeling Nov 15 '09 at 19:08
  • I'm not so sure about the "(150 MB/s) is well above what normal hard drives deliver", actually. I just checked the throughput on my most recent ZFS scrub (which is pretty a random-I/O intensive operation) on the large single-disk spinning-platter pool, and that shows ~124 MB/s in verification data throughput. (1.47TB verified as correct on disk in 3 hours 27 minutes.) If that disk was using SATA-I, that wouldn't leave much margin for lower-level stuff, let alone that ZFS scrubbing is an online operation. This doesn't invalidate the answer, though. – user Dec 14 '13 at 11:46