Recommend new disks compatible with old disks ?

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mainlydata

60 posts

Master Geek
+1 received by user: 1

#119725 11-Jun-2013 13:48

I have an old tower with a the following motherboard ...

Microstar K8N Neo4 Platinum motherboard, Socket 939, 4xDIMM, DDR, PCIe-16, 4xPCI, 10xUSB 2, Firewi

... currently there are two drives plugged into it in a RAID-1 array using the on mobo controller. The drives are ...

Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 ST3250823AS Hard Disk Drive, 250GB, 7,200rpm, 8192K cache, SATA-150, Fluid

... what's a drive I can buy today which would be compatible with that mother-board ?

I've looked at these ...

https://www.ascent.co.nz/productspecification.aspx?ItemID=401027

... but I'm not sure whether a 'SATA-6' drive would be able take the place of a 'SATA-150' drive.

Full disclosure: I know next to nothing about this stuff so if some of my question doesn't make sense ... that's why !

Ragnor

8279 posts

Uber Geek
+1 received by user: 585

Trusted

#834234 11-Jun-2013 14:25

That drive will work fine, pretty much any SATA drive should work fine as they are backward compatible.

The SATA connection will operate at the lowest/slowest "version" supported by both the controller on the drive and the controller on the mobo which is your case is SATA 150. This basically dictates the max throughput you can achieve, with a hard drive (as opposed to a SSD) you don't generally get over 100MB/s anyway so SATA 150 is fine.

The "marketing" name of the different SATA types isn't consistent eg: SATA 150, SATA 3 and SATA 6... it's easier to understand like this:
SATA 1.0 = 1500Mbit/s = 150MB/s
SATA 2.0 = 3000Mbit/s = 300MB/s
SATA 3.0 = 6000Mbit/s = 600MB/s

mainlydata

60 posts

Master Geek
+1 received by user: 1

#834260 11-Jun-2013 15:08

Thanks I appreciate it - particularly the "marketing to real-world" translations