Question about SATA 3.0 HDD on SATA 1.5 computer

Factual Questions
1

I have a Dell Dimension 8300. It came with single 160GB SATA 1.5Gb/s hard drive. About a year later, i installed a second hard drive, a 160GB Seagate SATA 1.5.

Now, i want to pull the second hard drive out and put it in an external enclosure. Then, i want to replace it in the computer with a larger drive, probably a Seagate 320 or 500GB SATA drive.

The thing is that all the new SATA drives now are SATA 3.0, and before i order a new drive i want to be sure that it will work in my computer. According to the Wikipedia article on Serial ATA, the 3.0 drives should work on older 1.5 systems. But the Wiki entry and this Western Digital page note that there are a few motherboard chipsets that have trouble with the newer SATA drives, and need “jumper shunt” hardware installed.

Now, because i got my computer from Dell, i was never really sure even what the brand of motherboard in my computer was. I downloaded and ran the Belarc Adviser, which gives a list of hardware and software, and under the heading Main Circuit Board it gave the following information:

Board: Dell Computer Corp. 0W2562
Serial Number: …CN4811144905PM.
Bus Clock: 800 megahertz
BIOS: Dell Computer Corporation A05 02/23/2004

I googled this stuff, but i’m still not clear about whether my motherboard will have any trouble running a SATA 3.0 hard drive.

Any advice would be most welcome.

2

Can’t give you a definitive answer, but a utility like CPU-Z will tell you the actual chipsets on your mobo. Then you can compare it against the list of the known problematic ones found in your articles.

3

Thanks.

I ran it, and my chipset doesn’t seem to be one of the affected ones. Also, i had a look on Seagate’s website, and according to them, you can get around the problem by switching a jumper on the HDD that will restrict it to SATA 1.5 transfer speeds.

I’ve ordered the hard-drive and enclosure now, so fingers crossed.

Thanks again.