MB Bios upgrade to use new WD SATA II 300 MB drives

[normcar]

Does anyone know if the MB manufactures will do or can do a bios upgrade to allow the new "WD Caviar SE16 SATA II hard drives combine 300 MB/s transfer rate and 16 MB cache" http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=133&Language=en, which have an estimated ship date of the week of June 6. WD simply says that if your motherboard does not support SATA II, then you will need a new SATA II IDE card.

These new HDs are quiet and cool.

[greymalkin]

hmmm..given the history of pc interfaces I'm going to make an educated guess that this is not going to be a simple bios update.

I don't recall any pci, agp, ide, or usb port ever being upgraded via the BIOS. It has always required that you puchase the new hardware.

[waheed]

The question you should be asking is does it give any noticable performance difference from current SATA hard drives.

I would say if your MB supports SATA II, then just upgrade to the latest firmware.

[waheed]

Well, according to the Asus website, you MB only supports SATA and not SATA II.

As greymalkin mentioned, you may need an additional SATA II card. (unless SATA II will work on SATA, in which case, speed is limited to SATA specs)

[normcar]

Here is a review of a SATA I & II drives. As single drives there is little or no difference. http://www.hardcoreware.net/reviews/review-283-1.htm Only RAID 0 drives seem to get a big speed boost.

[rallynavvie]

I'm waiting for the 10k SATA II drives. I'd like to see how they compare to their SCSI counterparts. I love SCSI to death but the price is just a kick in the pants.