Need a bit of help here because I'm at work and don't have too much time to find out for myself:

I have an Abit AX8 motherboard in the family computer, but it is only running with an ATA100 40GB Maxtor drive, running at 5400rpm. This is painfully slow and it's obviously the bottleneck - the system takes an age to start up even with the decent 1GB RAM and A64 3700+ CPU.

Can't seem to find many SATA HDD's right now, only SATA2, but the Abit AX8 does not have a SATA2 controller. Will it still operate at SATA(1) speed? It's not a big deal if it does because there is 0% noticeable improvement anyway, unless the rev's go up on the HDD, and it's not like I'm going to go and overclock my [families] HDD just yet.

So, I want to get them a 120GB or 160GB SATA HDD. Only decent ones are SATA2, so will it work...?

OK no big deal, I found out that it's 100% backwards compatible. I just bought them a 300GB HDD because I realised it was so cheap! I might put it in to my system... and sell it for more! Then they have my 200GB.

Laters.

Yup, SATA2 is backwards compatable - like USB I guess.

Well, even if the old motherboard doesn't like it - it can have my SATA150 HDD, because my motherboard supports SATA300. It would seem odd to have them the wrong way around. I need to explain to Microsoft how I upgraded my hard drive and needed to reinstall when I activate it again. Can't believe I'm using legal distributions of Windows XP Pro! I must be crazy.

Anyway, the hard drive was a 300GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 10, with 16MB of cache and a 7200rpm spindle speed. Not too bad at all, considering it only cost me ?79.00.

Nice drive. Actually, SATA2 is just for "future-proofing", only the Raptor comes close to making the 150MB/s throughput of SATA1.

Exactly my point!!