So I recently bought a 500 GB internal WD SATA 300 hard drive, but just then realized that I may not have the right data cable for it. I’m pretty sure I got some SATA cables with the motherboard I bought retail for my older rig, but at the time (2003) they probably would have been for SATA 150 drives. So I’m wondering, do SATA 150 and SATA 300 drives use the same data cables or not?
They use the same plug. There usually is a jumper on the hard drive itself that sets it to 150/300. The default is usually set at SATA 150.
Thanks. I was just worried that, despite the plug having the same shape, there might be something about the cable wiring itself that would throttle the bandwidth if I used the wrong cable. I’m just remembering how with ATA drives there was the ATA/33 standard, then there was the ATA/66 one that required the ribbon cable with the blue edge.