External USB hard drives may be USB 1.0, 2.0 or greater.
Western Digital is one of the world's largest hard drive manufacturers, and Asus accounts for 3.5 percent of the U.S. computer market, but only receives 0.2 percent of repair calls, according to Rescue.com. Many computer enthusiasts use parts from these companies to build their own computers or upgrade old machines. However, your Western Digital hard drive may not work well with all motherboards.
Asus A7A266
This older Asus motherboard came onto the market in 2001. It was aimed at consumers who wanted then-modern features at a budget cost. The A7A266 supports two DDR memory units, a socket 462 processor, five PCI cards and graphics cards compatible with the accelerated graphics port, or AGP Pro. It provides two IDE ports for hard drive connections and two rear USB 1.0 ports.
Internal Hard Drives
Most modern Western Digital internal drives use a serial ATA, or SATA, cable to connect with the motherboard. This interface offers reduced cable size, lower cost and faster data transfer than older IDE cables, also called parallel ATA, or PATA. The Asus A7A266 does not offer SATA connectors, and may not work with hard drives produced since the mid-2000s.
External Hard Drives
Western Digital's external hard drives all use USB ports to connect to the motherboard, but are designed for either the USB 2.0 or USB 3.0 standard. They should work on the Asus A7A266 motherboard, but may not reach their full rated transfer speeds. The Asus A7A266's USB 1.0 ports provide only 1.5 to 12 Mbits, while USB 2.0 and 3.0 can provide maximum bandwidths of 60 MBs and 5 Gbits, respectively.
Considerations
If you have a modern 320 Gb SATA hard drive from Western Digital, you may be able to use it with your Asus A7A266 motherboard via an adapter. As of the date of publication, these devices cost about $20 and connect an IDE port to a SATA cable. However, your drive may not perform to its full rating, because the adapter only makes the two connectors compatible and does not upgrade the IDE port to the full SATA bandwidth or provide native hot-swapping.
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