Onboard Sata Controller..older mobo

[steven1110]

I have an Asus A8n-SLI deluxe board that I'm currently using for my server reason being I thought it had 8 Sata II ports. But it only has 4 Sata II and 4 Sata 1.5mb. So my question is, would there be any problems (other than slower rates) installing the drivers for the Sata 1.5mb and using those ports with Sata II drives?

I think I have 2 discs that are natively Sata 1.5, an old 74gb raptor and a Maxtor 300gb 16mb cache NCQ disc but the raptor is currently my OS drive so I'm hesitant to test it out myself without getting some expert opinions.

Thanks

Steven

 

[epimetheus]

Only the latest hard drives are starting to reach the SATA 1 speed barrier. SATA 1 has a theoretical limit of 187.5MB/s and I haven't seen a single consumer drive break 150MB/s sustained. If you don't want to spend the money to upgrade, I think you'll be fine with what you have.

 

[UICompE02]

SATA 1 has a theoretical limit of 187.5MB/s

It's actually 150MB/s. Although the link operates at a physical rate of 1.5 gigabits/s, the encoding scheme that is used (8b/10b) uses 10 bit times to encode 8 bits of actual data, so the raw physical rate must be divided by 10 instead of 8 when figuring the throughput.

However, you're right, the SATA interface is not quite yet the limiting component at 1.5gb/s, the drive itself usually is.