Hello everyone,

I went to purchase a new 300GB hard drive for my Dell Dimension 8400, sadly mistaken to find when I brought it home, it did not use the normal multipin ATA cable, it uses a small square plug (along with the power cord). What is the name of this style plug?

I've heard it has a faster transfer rate; is that true? It is nice because I can plug up to four internal hard drives into my PC, but I've found it hard to come across this type of plug. Even Staples didn't have this style. Any ideas?

I do have a good idea with what I am working with internally, so if you have any questions, I can probably answer them... thanks a lot!

Square plug :confused: not overly descriptivem, wz. Maybe usb, maybe firewire, of which both are very fast - and traditionally external interfaces.

P2E

Quote:

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Originally Posted by wzartv

Hello everyone,

I went to purchase a new 300GB hard drive for my Dell Dimension 8400, sadly mistaken to find when I brought it home, it did not use the normal multipin ATA cable, it uses a small square plug (along with the power cord). What is the name of this style plug?

I've heard it has a faster transfer rate; is that true? It is nice because I can plug up to four internal hard drives into my PC, but I've found it hard to come accross this type of plug. Even Staples didn't have this style. Any ideas?

I do have a good idea with what I am working with internally, so if you have any questions, I can probably answer them... thanks a lot!

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Sorry, certainly not USB or firewire... this hard drive is internal... instead of using the classic 80 pin (or whatever it is) it appears the hard drive is using a four lead cable (not the power cable)... there are four plugs like this then on the motherboard to allow for up to four hard drives to be hooked up to it.

Very strange indeed, I've only seen this on one other computer besides mine... a very expensive unit that I worked on about a year ago (obviously I didn't work on the hard drives). I do have a good idea with what I'm talking about, so I know it is not a standard USB or firewire or anything like that... it is certainly internal and connects using this strange cable directly to the motherboard.

Thanks for your help!

Is it serial ATA?

Traditionally both usb and 1394 are external, however since attached devices are electrically connected in parallel, they are just as usable and accessible internally. Hard drives I/f's are 1384, usb, ata, scsi, sata, fiber-channel - or combinations theref of. Only USB & firewire use 4pins.

P2E

Quote:

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Originally Posted by wzartv

Sorry, certainly not USB or firewire... this hard drive is internal... instead of using the classic 80 pin (or whatever it is) it appears the hard drive is using a four lead cable (not the power cable)... there are four plugs like this then on the motherboard to allow for up to four hard drives to be hooked up to it.

Very strange indeed, I've only seen this on one other computer besides mine... a very expensive unit that I worked on about a year ago (obviously I didn't work on the hard drives). I do have a good idea with what I'm talking about, so I know it is not a standard USB or firewire or anything like that... it is certainly internal and connects using this strange cable directly to the motherboard.

Thanks for your help!

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Ok... I'm not sure now... lol... I'm going to call Dell and see what they can tell me - its just a pain because they barely speak English and the phone connection is usually horrible!

Thanks for your help and I'll tell you the results!

Hello,

Sorry for any confusion - you were right, I found out it is a SATA connection. My description wasn't all that great...

Is there a way to adapt the multi-pin cable to a SATA connection, or will I need that type of specific hard drive? (I'm used to working with older machines, so this is still new to me!)

Thanks again for your help!

Hi, I don't have much experience with the SATA drives, but I've found a controller card you can stick in your PCI slot:

http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/produ...duct_uid=48670


I doubt that you can directly convert the SATA drive to connect to the PATA IDE controller, otherwise I'm sure I would have used one by now but the controller card is not expensive. Maybe some others have experience of the benefits of SATA over PATA?

Hello,

That is a great site! Thanks, I will look into possibly purchasing one of those adapter cards, because it seems like nobody at Staples or Circuit city has any idea was SATA means!

I also found one online, so I might consider that one instead... we'll see...

Thanks again, everybody, you've been most helpful!

Ok,

I ordered a Maxtor Serial ATA hard drive, received it today. I found that it did not come with an SATA connection cable, so I had to purchase one of them separately.

It is properly installed in the computer (cable from hard drive to motherboard port 1, power cord installed correctly), but Windows doesn't seem to recognize it.

I DID have to enable SATA port 1 in the BIOS, which was successful - the BIOS accepts the hard drive, gives its brand name and GB size, so therefore the motherboard is recognizing that it is installed. The problem herein is that Windows does not seem to recognize it.

Restarted the computer, ran hardware wizard, etc. It will not appear in the "My Computer" folder.

Is there something special I need to do?

Windows XP Pro
Dell 3.2 GHz

Never mind... figured it out myself...

I found a piece of utility software in Windows called "Computer Management" and that allowed me to format the hard drive and assign it a drive letter.

Thanks for all your help!

With such a large HDD it may also be worth partitioning it to smaller drives, say 100 Gb a time.
Makes defrag and finding data easier.