SATA II controller card

[cigarman]

Hello,

My machine has both older and newer hardware, running win98 with plenty of ram and processor power. What I want to do is add a large, 320 gig SATA-150 hard drive to the mix using a controller card. I will want to put winXP on this drive and use it as a mutlimedia storage drive--mainly storing music files in wave file format. I'm new to SATA and I understand that now there is SATA II, which, if I understand correctly, provides an even greater data transfer rate.

My question is this: Will a SATA II controller card accept a SATA 150 hard drive or are we talking about incompatible interfaces? I might guess that this would work, but would like to know for sure.

You might be wondering why I wouldn't just get a SATA 150 controller card? Well, given that computer technology is always being improved upon with new standards on the horizon, I just wouldn't want a 320 gig SATA drive to become obsolete too quickly. Comparabley-sized SATA II drives are a little pricey, so I won't be going there right now. At least I'd have the appropriate controller card when SATA II becomes the norm.

Any input about SATA compatibility and any other info on this that you can give me would really be appreciated.

Thanks,

Tim

 

[Nodsu]

SATA150 and SATA300 devices are interchangeable no problem.

Mind you, there is virtually no speed difference between SATA150 and SATA300. The interface speed is meaningless, it is the hard drive itself that dictates the data rates. Plus, there are no desktop drives that can do sustained transfers over 100MB/s, so it will be many years before SATA150 actually becomes a bottleneck (perhaps when we get hybrid hard drives with huge solid state caches).