New to SATA

My motherboard is an Asus A8N5X. It supports SATA-150. I have no hands on experience with SATA, and so I have a few questions.

Are SATA-300 drives backwards compatible? (I would want to get the best technology possible for future compatibility.)
How easy (or difficult!) would it be to migrate the contents of my system drive over to the new drive? In the past, I have used xcopy32 (with some switches that tell it copy EVERYTHING including hidden and system files) to copy the contents of my IDE system drive to a new drive. I imagine the same could be done with a SATA drive, but then how do I make the new drive the boot drive?

If copying my old drive to the new drive and then making the new drive the boot drive is really complicated, I may just use the new drive for storage, but I'd really like to have my OS on the new drive since SATA is faster, even if only a little.

 

I am almost positive the SATA drives are backwards compatible. You should not have any trouble hooking up a SATA drive and copying your disk to it. If you are talking about setting up a SATA RAID, that is more complicated. You should be able to choose the drive the computer boots from in the BIOS.

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Thanks for the answers. Another question: does everything we know and love about partitions, logical drives, active partitions, etc... apply to SATA?

 

That is a good question! I have been wondering about this myself. I did some looking around and it appears to be the same stuff! I am not sure about partitions in a RAID though I would think they would be the same.

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I'm not sure how much we know but I've got around 35 drives and I treat them all the same regardind partitions etc. I just don't like how fragile the Sata small wire connector is. The drive mfg wont cover warrenty regarding fragile or poor design.

 

i know seagate drives have a jumper that make it goto sata150.that is what i have now.