SATA II cable?

[HOCP4ME]

I just ordered a WD SATA II drive. I looked on Newegg and FrozenCPU.com, but all of their cables either said SATA 150 or just SATA cable. Where can I get a SATA II cable, or are they both the same?

 

[apHytHiaTe]

I don't believe the SATA II spec has changed how the cables are designed. Your old SATA cable will most likely work without issue.

Can anyone back me up on this?

 

[UICompE02]

That's correct. There is no difference between the SATA 1.5gb/s cables and the SATA 3.0gb/s cables.

 

[HOCP4ME]

Okay, thanks. I wonder then why Newegg puts "SATA 150" in the title of all of their SATA cables.

 

[TeeJayHoward]

Okay, thanks. I wonder then why Newegg puts "SATA 150" in the title of all of their SATA cables.

SATA 150 is probably listing the speed of the cable. A SCSI U320 cable and a U160 cable are both the same size, but the U320 cable is rated for higher speed. It's probably simular with SATA 150 and SATA 300.

(Think Cat5 vs. Cat6. Same cable, but Cat6 is rated for higher speeds.)

Dear lord. I fell asleep on the keyboard. I am going to bed.

 

[StorageJoe]

Realisticly, it doesn't matter as all that you'll pull through it is about 95mb/s anyway. The weakest link in the chain in the internals of the drive, not the SATA cable.

 

[Zamboni]

Most of the "SATA II" cables seem to have the metal locking clips for the new sockets. It's probably the same cable with a different boot on the end.

If you want to be truly 1337, Western Digital has their own version called SecureConnect:
http://store.westerndigital.com/product.asp?sku=2428641

 

[UICompE02]

Realisticly, it doesn't matter as all that you'll pull through it is about 95mb/s anyway. The weakest link in the chain in the internals of the drive, not the SATA cable.

Well, it doesn't matter, but not for that reason exactly. Even though the drive is only pumping less than 100MB/s of actual data through the cable, the SATA II protocol and physical layer is always transmitting something at 3Gb/s. Typically it's just random idle data, but there is always something being transmitted so that the receivers can keep their clocks synchronized with the data stream (since SATA cables don't have a separate clock signal, it has to be recovered from the data stream itself).

 

[UICompE02]

SATA 150 is probably listing the speed of the cable. A SCSI U320 cable and a U160 cable are both the same size, but the U320 cable is rated for higher speed. It's probably simular with SATA 150 and SATA 300.

(Think Cat5 vs. Cat6. Same cable, but Cat6 is rated for higher speeds.)

Dear lord. I fell asleep on the keyboard. I am going to bed.

Unlike U160 and U320 SCSI, though, SATA 1.5gb/s cables are already capable of transmitting at 3.0gb/s, so there was no need to change the cable specification to meet the higher speeds.