SATA and SATA2?

[Canuck]

I am getting a new harddrive for my MSI K8N NEO2 Platinum motherboard. The motherboard is compatible with SATA drives. Will I be able to use a SATA2 drive with this motherboard? I don't know if there is a difference is between SATA and SATA2.

Thanks

[GamersCrib]

Your best bet is to stick with just SATA... here is why:

On-Board IDE/SATA
• An IDE controller on the nVIDIA nForce3 Ultra chipset provides IDE HDD/CD-ROM with PIO, Bus Master and Ultra DMA133/100/66 operation modes.
• Can connect up to 4 IDE devices
• Supports 4 SATA ports. Transfer rate is up to 150MB/s <<<--- SATA drives go up to this speed.. SATAII goes higher but will be bottlenecked by your board.
• NV RAID (Software)
• Supoprt up to 4 SATA & 4 ATA133 Hard drives
- RAID 0 or 1, 0+1, JBOD is supported
- RAID function work w/ATA133 + SATA H/D




SATA2 is a fast and loose standard that should include 300MB/s (three hundred megabytes per second, also called 3 gigabit) speeds. So 3Gb is part of the SATA2 thing.

OK, so SATA is SATA 150.
SATA2 is normally SATA 300, and
SATA 300 is SATA 3Gb.


SATA included the 150MB/s standard, which could be called 1.5 gigabit. SATA2 should include the 300MB/s standard, often called 3 gigabit, plus some advanced features like Native Command Queueing.

Because various manufacturers did various things with their SATA2 hardware, a new strict standard was created called SATA2.5, that for the most part guarantees that all SATA2 features are incorporated into a product.

Here is more info on it too..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA