Possibly dumb general hard-drive question

[TNM]

Hello,
I\'m building a \"giga-box\" I will be using the ECS K7S5A motherboard with I believe only supports ata/100. I bought a drive from Office depot.com (which IF Maxtor honors the rebate will be $58 for a new 60 gig harddrive) anyway. On the site it said the drive was ata/100 but the box says it is ata/133 - I\'m more inclined to believe the box - anyway - can this work on the motherboard? I thought these things were backwards compatible? Or do I need to send it back?
Thanks,
Tom Martin
http://www.mp3.com/T__Nathaniel_Martin (\"http://www.mp3.com/T__Nathaniel_Martin\")

[Vertigo50]

This is not a dumb question, and it\'s a very confusing issue. First of all, ALL of the components are backward-compatible. If you plug a ATA-66 into an ATA-100 motherboard, it will just run it at 66. If you plug an ATA-133 drive into an ATA-100 motherboard, it will just run at 100.

Just keep in mind that it will revert to the slowest speed, and if you run two hard drives at different ATA speeds on the same cable, they will both run at the lower speed.

I wouldn\'t take your hard drive back. It will run at ATA-100, and you wouldn\'t notice a difference between 100 and 133 anyway, until the drives get faster.

One thing you\'ll want to make sure of with your K7s5a, though, is that the drive gets set to DMA mode, as opposed to PIO mode, which is MUCH, MUCH slower. Do a search on Google if you don\'t know much about it. It should default to DMA, but you\'ll want to check.