Well i just had some massive hard drive failure :dry: and i need to replace/upgrade my current 120 GB Seagate SATA150 hard drives. My motherboard current supports 2 Serial ATA connections @ 150 mb/s. However it seems most SATA drives on the market are currently SATA 3.0 GB/s drives. Can i buy the SATA 3.0 GB/s drives and use them with my older motherboard (with a slow down of data transfer rate) ? Also, i am thinking of upgrading my system to a Raid1 configuration (2 mirrored drives) in order to prevent future data loss/problems would you recommend doing this? or is it a waste of time and it is easier just to back up your data on a second hard drive. Thanks for the help & recommendations in advance
A) most SATA HDDs have a jumper allowing you to limit the data transfer rate from 3.0 to 1.5. B) well, there are pros and cons to having a personal raid1 conf. Like for me, I'd just go without any raid and use the extra disk space to store data, since the data amount which is aboslutely important to me isn't taking so much space. And as for backups, you could just make a HDD image or copy selected data on DVDs... but thats just IMO.
SATA2 is backward compatible, so, any SATA2 device will work on a SATA controller, however, they will only work @ the speed they were designed for (1.5) RAID is good if you want to make sure you ALWAYS keep the data you are securing by using RAID, although i'm not an expert in RAID BTW: i believe RAID 1+0 (mirror) was originally discovered by accident, by someone misconfiguring their HDDs jumpers, however, today you have to purchase a RAID card Edit: for more info on RAID, check out the RAID wiki here
