sata 150 and sata 300 drive compatibility

[Luis Ortega]

If I have a laptop with a sata 150 capability, can I use a sata 300 drive in it?
I assume that it would run at sata 150 performance, but is it compatible?
Would I be able to benefit from the larger cache size? Would it tend to run cooler? Any other possible benefits or drawbacks?
The selection of sata 300 laptop drives is greater than the sata 150 now, and many of them offer a larger cache size (32mb instead of 16 mb).
Thanks for any advice.

 

[Hellhammer]

Yes, I think so.

 

[rhyx]

Yes newer drives are backwards compatible.

 

[Designer Dale]

Yes newer drives are backwards compatible.

Does this mean that a SATA 300 will run like a SATA 150? That would be a waste of money.

Dale

 

[Guiyon]

Does this mean that a SATA 300 will run like a SATA 150? That would be a waste of money.

Dale

Not really as a single, consumer-grade mechanical drive is not yet capable of saturating a SATA150 channel, much less a SATA300 one; this goes doubly so for 5400RPM laptop drives. However, a SSD or a high-speed mechanical HD (ie: Raptor, Velociraptor, etc.) is perfectly capable of saturating a SATA150 channel.

 

[Hellhammer]

Not really as a single, consumer-grade mechanical drive is not yet capable of saturating a SATA150 channel, much less a SATA300 one; this goes doubly so for 5400RPM laptop drives. However, a SSD or a high-speed mechanical HD (ie: Raptor, Velociraptor, etc.) is perfectly capable of saturating a SATA150 channel.

That's true. Only few hard drives are able to transfer data over 187.5MB/s (SATA150's max), but most SSDs will lose their speed if used in SATA150. BTW, Raptors use SAS interface (at least mostly) and it's able to transfer 6Gbits/s (750MB/s)