Hard drive connection

[tomween1]

OK sorry if this is a minor question to most but I don't know this. When installing a new hard drive, is the flat cable still the only way to connect it to the mobo? Reading and looking at many forum's, Youtube, etc it almost looks like plugging in a SATA plug is enough. is this right? Or is it, if you have more then one hd you would plug the first one in using the flat cable then any additional hd's into the SATA ports???

[The Wise Monkey]

They long flat cable with a rectangular block at either end is an IDE cable and was used before SATA (the smaller cable with a sort of L-shape indentation at either end) was introduced.

Hard drives and optical drives usually only support one of the two, and you can mix and match if you want. For tidiness and better performance, SATA drives are the way to go.

The only problem with IDE is that it only supports a maximum of two drives per cable - a Master and a Slave drive. SATA has no concept of this, so you can have as many SATA drives as you can fit in.

[tomween1]

Well I've purchased a new Gigabyte GA-MA790. Reading the contents (online, haven't received it yet) It says it comes w/ One HD flat cable and 6 SATA cables. So, if I'm looking for a new SATA HD, what would be the best acronym to look for?

Thanks, Tom

[The Wise Monkey]

Just get any HD that says SATA as the interface. :)

For example:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136298

[tomween1]

Thank you, again. If you could educate me on one last item, what is the difference between SATA and SATA 11?

Thanks

[The Wise Monkey]

It is SATA II i.e. SATA 2, not SATA 11.

SATA II offers a transfer speed of up to 3Gb/s, while standard SATA offers only up to 1.5Gb/s.

SATA II is backwards compatible, so you don't need to worry about compatibility issues; any SATA hard drive will work with any motherboard with SATA ports.