OK time for a stupid question... Can a SATA II device work in a SATA I port? Albeit with a lower transfer rate? Thanks
They can, a lot of SATA-II drives actually have a jumper pin to change the mode. Some even come with SATA-I mode set and to use SATA-II you need to remove the jumper, or at least was the case with my Seagate drives.
my seagates are identical apart froim the fact that one is a SATAII drive.. What jumper are you referring to delphium?? i have found none..
My Barracudas have a TINY little gray jumper next to the SATA connector. Just pull it off to increase the theoretical transfer rates. In actuality, nothing changed, but the drives seemed to play nicer with my RAID ocntroller. ???
Best to check your specific planned Sata II drive's website for details of how - eg I think my Hitachi drive ships as Sata1 and you have to run their proprietary software tool to 'upgrade' to Sata II.
I'm pretty sure that the SATA spec as a whole requires compatibility between drives and controllers of different revisions, much like PATA drives at different speeds do. If both the drive and controller have a SATA plug, it should work, at the slower of the two if they're not the same speed.
There was a little jumper next to the SATA and power connectors on my 500gb barracudas. pic source from hothardware.com
I'm using SATA II 3gb drives, on a 4 year old Dell with SATA I and all I do is set drives to 1.5gb via little jumper . . . very easy, no problems.
