Connecting newer drives to older mobo/CPUs

[spanky]

Generally speaking, is there a problem connecting newer faster HDDs or optical drives to PC with an older mobo/CPU combo, assuming they are the supported interface type, of course?

What are the important specs to look at to determine if the components will run together suitably?

 

[iss]

There should not be a problem with optical drives. but newer larger hard drives may not be recognized as the proper size on mobo's with older Bios that Dont support hard drives larger than 37Gb or 137GB.

 

[spanky]

There should not be a problem with optical drives. but newer larger hard drives may not be recognized as the proper size on mobo's with older Bios that Dont support hard drives larger than 37Gb or 137GB.

Thanks for the reply.

How can you find out what the BIOS supports? Is that ever included in the technical documentation of the computer? If not, can you go into the BIOS and see what it supports?

The reason I ask is because I want to buy an older P3-ish(or AMD equiv) 1-2GHZ-ish computer off of ebay and put a new hard drive in it.