New to SATA

Hello!

I have this mobo:
http://usa.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=12&l3=45&model=407&modelmenu=1

In the manual, it syays: 2x Serial ATA with RAID 0, 1 function

Now, I have been using IDE all my life, and I am just getting into SATA. I know it uses a differnt power connector, so I will get that. I went to newegg to see what SATA drives they have. They have Serial ATA150 drives and SATA 3.0Gb/s. I am going to guess that the 3.0gb one, I don't have, and only newer mobos have that. I ask that can if I use both Serial ATA150 drives and SATA 3.0Gb/s(the 3.0gb drive will just downgrade the speed and work?). If there is any more info I need to know about SATA, that would help me out! Also if you know any HDDs that have SATA that would work w/ my mobo would also help me out. 

Thanks! 

-- HERE ARE THE DEFINITIVES --

A SATA drive is still essentially the same as any other hard drive, except that the cabling is much more sensible and convenient to work with.

Most mobos will have IDE ports on them for use either with older hard drives and/or CD/DVD drives.  Naturally, you may use just about any configuration that pleases you.  Do take careful note of the boot sequence settings in your BIOS.

Many times, some utility programs may have trouble seeing SATA drives but there are usually workarounds.  (Note: Partition Commander has no trouble at all with SATA drives and is fairly inexpensive)

Most all hardd rives today are either 5600 or 7200 rpm.  This is the only true limit to your disk's speed, no matter what the cabling.  Although virtually hard drives have 2MB-8MB buffers built-in to catch any data being saved as it is sent to the disks (also good for quick access to repeated reads of small file segments), the generally rule of thumb is that the platter speed of a 7200 drive will average between 20MB and 40MB per second... but it will max out at around 60MB/sec on occasion.  5200 drives are slower than this.  There are a few 10000 rpm models out there, but they are generally no larger than 100GB at present and are horribly expensive... it's just not worth it and I would sooner recommend a triple-drive RAID 5 array system which would perform much better anyhow and still be cheaper.

RAID is another topic altogether.  Originally conceived as a means of protecting data storage by means of redundancy schemes, it is the basis for both SCSI and SATA technology.  IN THEORY, there are ways with the right hardware and software to do this same thing with old IDE drives but nobody really does this.  In any case, SATA drives generally require "RAID drivers" in order to function, and you may need a boot floppy (or boot CD) with the RAID drivers on it when installing many operating systems (eg: all versions of Windows).  Once installed, the RAID drivers will become part of the permanent drive base for the operating system and it will boot normally from there on.

There did that help?