What cable do I need for a SATA II disk?

[Sysman]

Pardon the ignorance but I've never dealt with these before.

Bought a reasonably cheap no-name PC with AMD CPU and ASUS motherboard. It came with one SATA II disk and I want to add another. Additional disk arrived, but with no cables, and on opening the PC I can't easily determine what cable(s) I need.

Do I need a power cable as well for extra SATA disks? There's a spare cable in the PC which looks suspiciously suitable, but of course it's too short to reach the main drive bay (would be OK for a second CD/DVD though).

Yes I've Googled, but so far have only come up with confusing (contradictory?) results.

I also tried a local shop but it appears that Joe Public doesn't fit extra internal drives nowadays, and could only find eSata cables, which I assume won't do the trick.

[doodab]

Scan.co.uk: NLRB-307LOCK - 90CM STRAIGHT - STRAIGHT SATA I/II DATA CABLE WITH LOCKING LATCHES

Something like this should do.

For the power, you may have a similar looking (but different, it has less pins) plug spare or you can probably get some sort of splitter or adapter for whatever you do have.

[Spacecadet]

SATA II is just marketing crap

Cable matters? SATA vs. SATA II - Hard-Disks - Storage

[Sysman]

SATA II is just marketing crap

Cable matters? SATA vs. SATA II - Hard-Disks - Storage

Ah thanks. Now I remember that the "II" bit was just the name of the organisation that took over over from the previous one, or something like that.

From 2005, What's in a name? SATA II Misconceptions

However, the real surprise to us came when the majority of SATA II drives available right now are not capable of 3.0Gbps transfer speeds and others don't claim support for features we almost take for granted; like NCQ. The original SATA standard - usually referred to as SATA, U150, SATA150, or SATA I - gave us a peak transfer rate from the HDD interface to the system bus of about 1.5Gbps. Many believe that if SATA I drives have transfer rates of 1.5Gbps, then 3.0Gbps rates must be held by drives which have SATA II in their names. This is definitely not the case according to the SATA organization:

"The first step toward a better understanding of SATA is to know that SATA II is not the brand name for SATA's 3Gb/s data transfer rate, but the name of the organization formed to author the SATA specifications. The group has since changed names, to the Serial ATA International Organization, or SATA-IO." - SATA-IO, Serial ATA International Organization

and do remember folks, that the 3 Gbps is just peak transfer rate.

and of course that's bits not bytes:

Also recall that even though a SATA device might claim 3Gbps transfer rates, 20% of the bandwidth is dedicated for parity in the encoding scheme of the bus - which is why we claim effective thoroughput of 300MBps as opposed to 375MBps.

[doodab]

http://www.serialata.org/developers/...guidelines.asp

Whatever you call it you will need a cable with the right connectors on the end.

[Sysman]

As a followup I got a SATA cable and a "Y" Molex to 2 SATA power cable.

Both 50 cm long according to the packaging and invoice. Neither are anything like 50 cm long - more like 10 cm. i must admit I was wondering if I really needed 50 cm, but that was the smallest I found.

And folks wonder why I don't like online shopping. Sigh...