Is a SATA 3.0 motherboard compatable with 1.5 devices?

Question

i.e. can I use my older 1.5 hard drives in a motherboard with 3.0 ports? I know that a 3.0 hard disk will work in a 1.5 motherboard port, but vice versa?

Anyone have it working?

1.5 and 3.0 represent the Gb/s transfer rate. Sometimes called SATA I or II respectively.

Answer 1

2nd generation of SATA (also called SATA II or SATA 2.0) have extra features like Native Command Queuing (NCQ) which can significantly decrease disk access time. In some cases, you could see as much as a 15-20% increase in overall performance over a standard SATA or IDE hard drive.

It is important to note that 2nd generation or SATA II is not the same thing as SATA 3 Gb/s.

Don't be fooled by the speed rating. It is talking about the bandwidth on the channel being wider to allow more traffic through at once. It's not really talking about the speed of data being transferred. Think of a single drive like a single car travelling down a 4-lane highway. The extra lanes don't make a difference to the one car, much like the extra bandwidth to just one drive.. It's when you build large drive arrays (RAID) that many company servers have, where you start to see the benefit of the extra bandwidth (a lot of cars fighting for room on the highway).

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That's probably more than you wanted to know, but to answer your question, yes it's backwards compatible. A 1.5 Gb/s drive will work on 3.0 ports, and a 3.0 Gb/s drive will work on a 1.5 Gb/s port.

Answer 2

I never heard about Sata 3
Are you sure there are any Sata more than 2