Sata2 hard drive does not work on an older machine

December 4, 2010 at 4:27 pm Leave a comment

I recently purchased a 2TB SATA2 drive to use for backup on my old computer. The computer is old but have a SATA 1.5 Gb connector on the motherboard. The drive uses a SATA2 (3.0 Gb) interface. SATA2 uses the same connector as SATA and I thought they were backwards compatible with eachother. Apparently, this was not the case. The drive was powering up and spinning, but is not able to autodetect the slower interface.

I went to the drive manufacturer’s web site and looked up the manual. In the manual, it indicated that you can set the jumper to the slower interface. I added the jumper and the drive worked right away. Since it is not a fast drive, I am doubtful that SATA2 would have made much of a difference in the performance any way. So if your SATA drive do not work with an older machine and the power and connection appears to be correct, you may want to see if you can lock the drive at the lower transfer rate to get it to work.