I’ve just bought a 500Gb Seagate HDD and it does not have the regular power connectors. It has something called SATA power connectors? What is that? I have a Asus A8NE board and I don’t have any cable which looks like it would fit in that.
Is this a regular connector? Should I return the HDD to my vendor and ask him to source me a regular one with normal power connectors?
You can get the sata-to-molex power adapter 
But isn’t it part of the standard package - my HDD came in a magnetically shielded plastic(?) bag. In India doesn’t the HDD come with packaged cable
Get SATA Power Adapters which will convert your existing molex power connector into 15pin SATA power connectors.
Approx cost of these? Do people who get HDD also buy this separately? Shouldn’t this be part of the package?
No it doesn’t come with the package… I had to buy mine separately from my dealer for the adapter… I got it for 40 bucks…
It should have come with the motherboard. Check your mobo box again
Thats the first thing i did - unfortunately its not part of that kit
UPDATE: Asked my dealer to get me one - let’s see if that works out.
i got the adapter + sata data cable for 25bucks.
usually the retailer u buy hdd from gives the same for free.
Congratulations for 500GB drive…
Thanks mate - Me too got the cable for 25 bucks.
Surprisingly I have to connect the 2 SATA HDD to SATA1 and SATA4 slots respectively to work - otherwise the machine just mobo doesn’t boot up at all !!
Does that means that the other two slots are kaput? Or does these also have that RAM kind of theory where we have to use 1 & 3 instead of 1 & 2 for two modules.
How does the mobo know which HDD to boot from? All SATA slots are called Masters in the CMOS (First master, second master, and so on). Is it possible to install the OS in the 3rd master and boot from it and have the data disk as the first master?
There will be an option in the BIOS to set the boot priority…just check once
Boot priority has options named ‘Hard Disk’, ‘CD ROM’, ‘Removable Drive’. The problem is that you may have multiple HDDs. With IDEs it was a concept of master/slave, but now with SATA I don’t know whether the same holds true
Well in my DFI nf4, there is an option, Hard disk boot priority, where I can set priority for each HDD. i was assuming the same was with your motherboard.
This I don’t know of - Can someone confirm whether A8Ne has this option?
in my knowledge every mobo has two options Hard disk priority & boot priority
he must have checked boot priority while you are talking about Hard disk priority
i had a Asus A8N-E from April 2006 to August 2006 & it had the option
If you are unable to find Hard disk priority in BIOS then manage by seeing numbering 1,2,3,4 SATA ports on motherboard as..
SATA PORT 1-----Primary Master
SATA PORT 3-----Primary Salve
SATA PORT 2-----Secondary Master
SATA PORT 4-----Secondary Salve
Okay - So the way it is connected right now is 500Gb is Primary Master and 320 Gb is Secondary Slave - I guess I can live with that.
In the Main menu of the A8N-E bios, the following options are there, in addition to others-
First SATA Master
Second SATA Slave
Third SATA Master
Fourth SATA Slave
You can enable or disable any of them.
(I am also still with A8N-E)
Yes - those are the options, but the sequence doesn’t seem to make any difference. I tried many combination of this and finally managed to have the mobo detect the HDDs. Surprisingly, even if i say ‘None’ in the BIOS, the HDD is detected once it boots in XP. I did not know this.