SATA I, II, & III Question.

[pro2a]

I have a co-worker who has a circa 2004 tower. I looked at it and it looks like it can be moderately upgraded to add some speed. He uses it for media and internet. He wants a newer processor, more RAM, a better hard drive, and if I can fit it in the budget a lower end GPU. The RAM and processor are no problem, but he wants to try an SSD since I was talking about how much awesomeness the OCZ fairies sprinkled into mine He already has a 250GB 7200RPM HDD of some sort. His MoBo has 2 SATA 1 slots. What would be the worst case scenario if I plugged a SATA 2 or 3 SSD into a SATA 1 port? Will it just throttle back the transfer speeds or will it just not work? He wants to make the SSD his primary boot drive as well.

Thanks for the help.

 

[PP Mguire]

Your max throughput would be 150MB/s theoretically. Still much faster than a typical drive both ways.

Edit: If the machine has a PCI-E slot of any kind not being used you can always get a SATA3 card which also has USB3.