Type Of Cable To Hook Hard Drive To Motherboard?

Type Of Cable To Hook Hard Drive To Motherboard?

Ok, you thought when you bought a hard drive it already includes a cable with it to connect to the motherboard. But they just don’t sell it together. The ribbon cable for IDE hard drive and the control cable for SATA hard drive are sold separately and are not included when you purchase a new hard drive.

Before purchasing a SATA hard drive, make sure to check your motherboard first if it has available ports for SATA drives or to verify if it supports SATA drives. The port for SATA drive is different from the IDE drive. The control cable for IDE drive has 40 pins while the one with SATA drive has only 7 pins. See image.

In case your motherboard does not support SATA drives, you need to purchase a SATA adapter and install it in one of the PCI slots on your motherboard. Installing the SATA drive is no different when you are installing an IDE drive. If you know how to install an IDE drive, just do the same with SATA drive.

Configure the jumper setting of the hard drive to set it as master or slave depending on what you require. If you need to install an operating system to the hard drive, it must be set to master because operating systems don’t boot on slave drives.