Will 3.0 gigabit HDD work on a 1.5 gigabit controller?

Question

My laptop has a 120 GB HDD at 1.5gigabits/s. Actually it has some bad blocks and is very slow. I'm planning to buy a new hard disk. My question is if I buy a HDD with 3.0 gigabits/s speed, will it work on my laptop?
(My laptop is LENOVO G430-4152 and is 3 years old. )

Update 1:
Actually I bought a new HDD now with 3.0gbs. Now when I replaced it with my old hard drive and start booting, it is giving some loud 'clicking sound'. Why is this happening?. Does that anything to do with my gigabits??. My laptop runs smooth with my old harddrive.

Answer 1

SATA specification is backward compatible. If you buy a SATA3 disk, it will run in a normal SATA interface. And so on, and so on.

It will work, with the maximum possible speed.
1.5Gbps means 192MB/s. I doubt you will find a laptop HDD which will run faster. Maybe if you buy an SSD... maybe.

Answer 2

In most cases, SATA chipsets are forwards and backwards compatible, and so plugging a SATA 2 drive into a SATA 1 port will just work.

There are some motherboards where this is not the case, in which case the SATA2 drive can be switched down to 1.5 speeds (in most cases).

If you purchase a drive with the jumper, then it will definitely work, if you don't, it will probably work anyway.

Answer 3

Most hard drives have a jumper setting to limit the transfer rate to 1.5. So the specification 3.0 refers to the maximum rate, not the selectable options.