SATA/300 drives backwards compatibility

[Anacondo]

Hi. I have an nForce4 based motherboard with SATA/150 support and I plan to buy a new hard disk. I found a WD unit at a good price, but it is SATA/300 model.

I suppose SATA/150 disks will work just fine on a SATA/300 mobo, but what about the contrary? Can I use SATA/300 drives with a SATA/150 controller?

Thanks in advance.

[Gehenna]

For WD (SATA 300) units ,if you short pins 5-6 ,the drive will revert to Serial ATA 1.0 (150mb/s transfer rate limitation)

Im pretty sure SATA 2 is compaitable with SATA 1 and vice-versa,but being you are using WD drives,just setting the jumper will guarantee it will work on your controller.

Bottom line..The jumper is their purely for compaitability issues with chipsets.

Heres a link with pics
Western Digital Jumper Settings (http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_faqid=981&p_created=1052339456&p_sid=QgdoqLbi&p_lva=&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9zb3J0X2J5PSZwX2dyaWRzb3J0PSZwX3Jvd19jbnQ9NDAwJnBfcHJvZHM9JnBfY2F0cz0mcF9wdj0mcF9jdj0mcF9zZWFyY2hfdHlwZT1hbnN3ZXJzLnNlYXJjaF9mbmwmcF9wYWdlPTEmcF9zZWFyY2hfdGV4dD1qdW1wZXIgc2V0dGluZ3Mgc2F0YQ**&p_li=&p_topview=1)

[Anacondo]

Many thanks, man, I was just looking for that info in WD's site. :)

Besides that, do you (or anyone else) have first hand experience with this? I just want to be sure; it looks perfectly reasonable.

[Gehenna]

You will be fine,when i said `Im pretty sure`, i meant 99.9% sure. ;)

Pretty much all new SATA drives coming out these days are SATA II anyways.

So your 99.9% (will it work in my system) factor,would actually be 100% because you can force it into a SATA I drive.

[Anacondo]

OK then. It seems voltage won't be an issue, too, so everything's fine.

Thanks! I'll let you know how it goes. :)