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sata 1 and 2 hard disk compatibility

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buenos

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hi

we have some hard disks, named SATA2 compatible.
as far as i know, the sata2disks dont work with sata1 controllers, only if the disk has a jumper to force to sata1 mode.
these disks dont mention any jumpers in their datasheet, but they say its also sata1 compatible.

how is it then? auto negotiation? i thought that works only in 1 way: the sata2 controller detects the disk speed. the sata1 controller doesnt detet anything.
 

SATA speed negotiation is required to be supported by gen2 host and device and should guarantee interoperation of any combination without manual configuration.
 

so then why are there jumpers on some disks?

this is from wikipedia, about SATA:
"According to the hard drive manufacturer Maxtor, motherboard host controllers using the VIA and SIS chipsets VT8237, VT8237R, VT6420, VT6421L, SIS760, SIS964 found on the ECS 755-A2 which was manufactured in 2003, do not support SATA 3 Gbit/s drives. To address interoperability problems, the largest hard drive manufacturer Seagate/Maxtor have added a user-accessible jumper-switch known as the Force 150, to switch between 150 MB/s and 300 MB/s operation.[3] Users with a SATA 1.5 Gbit/s motherboard with one of the listed chipsets should either buy an ordinary SATA 1.5 Gbit/s hard disk, buy a SATA 3 Gbit/s hard disk with the user-accessible jumper, or buy a PCI or PCI-E card to add full SATA 3 Gbit/s capability and compatibility. Western Digital uses jumper setting called "OPT1 Enabled" to force 150 MB/s data transfer speed."
 

May be the manufacturers found a reason to provide this option. The SATA phsysical layer spec doesn't know it, thus I said, interoperation should work without manual configuration.
 

"should" and "reality" are 2 different things.
 

Well, the SATA specification is still a valid standard for any implementation.

A samsung user manual shares my view, that a manual configuration isn't generally necessary:
In some rare cases SATA 1.5Gb/s hosts can not establish SATAinterface connection with SATA 3.0Gb/s devices due to interface protocol issues.
They don't use jumpers, but have a special software tool for these rare cases.
 

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