ncmark wrote:

Okay I am a complete newbie wen it come to SATA so I want to ask this question.
I am building a new system around an ASUS a7v600, which is at this point an older board and only supports SATA I So will be be able to use any SATA devices? I have been reading up on various forums and find mixed answers. I understand some hard drives may require me to set a jumper, limiting it to SATA I speeds. On the other hand, what about optical drives? You can still get PATA hard drives, but the PATA DVD drives are pretty much gone, unless you want to resort to ebay.

I have an Abit AN7 with a sil3112 chip that will work with 250gb+ drives if you patch your bios with the latest raid rom available

Optical drives are SATA Gen 1 from what I've seen. It's like how PATA optical drives tended to be at most UDMA 66. They don't need much bandwidth.

The main difference with SATA disc drives compared to PATA ones is that they lack the analog output for CD audio, which even the latest gen PATA DVD drives usually still had. This isn't really relevant with current OS though, as I'm not even sure if Windows 7 still has the option to toggle between analog and digital playback.

Well said!

With Windows XP, you can listen to Audio CD tracks digitally. So SATA drivers are fun.

Many hard drives have a jumper to limit the speed to SATA 1.

At least on Intel chipset boards, for example Intel 865, modern SATA 3 drives work fine. They are nice and fast and great storage option for XP builds.

I do recommend creating a single, smaller partition, for compatibility. I usually go with 30GB.