Replacement hard drive selection

[Matt_McKee]

Hello,
I have a HP 600PRO SFF desktop that was given to me. It currently has a 250Gb hard drive in it. The current hard drive is a seagate ST3250318AS. If the info I found is correct, it just states SATA 3Gb/S NCQ (not sure what that means).

I was looking at the black 1 TB drive with a 64Mb cache, but noticed they are a SATA III 6Gb/S. Will this work for me? I’m confused about the SATA types and SATA cable fitting the drives. I will be doing a fresh installation of Windows 7 or Windows 8.

[Timothy_G]

SATA 3Gb/s refers to a connection called SATA 2. It is a throughput rating for data transfer speeds. The SATA 6Gb/s refers to the newer SATA 3 connection. This connection is downward compatible on most motherboards to allow you to connect a SATA 3 drive on a SATA 2 motherboard. The two things you need to find out are,

1. Does your HP motherboard support SATA 3 drive connections
2. Will the BIOS of your HP motherboard support a 1TB size drive.
   In some cases, the BIOS will limit the size of drives it will support. This can be checked on the HP support site and also make sure that the BIOS firmware on the motherboard is up to date. If you don’t know what firmware is, it is just the software that runs on the motherboard itself.