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Hello all.

I am working on my second build, so I am still quite the novice. I purchased the parts to build a machine for my father, and I'm afraid that I may have bought some incompatible parts, or I am possibly missing some components.

The motherboard is an ASUS M2N-SLI ( found here: Newegg.com - Open Box: ASUS M2N-SLI AM2 NVIDIA nForce 560 SLI MCP ATX AMD Motherboard )

The hard drive is a Western Digital Caviar SE WD1600AAJS (found here: Newegg.com - Western Digital Caviar SE WD1600AAJS 160GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - Internal Hard Drives )

Because both were ordered OEM in order to save money, I'm afraid they have come without components. The cord, for a lack of better technical terminology, to hook the hard drive to the motherboard is therefore missing. I opened up an older computer of mine to "borrow" said cord and hook it up, and herein lies my problem. I find the proper place to plug it into my motherboard, but I then have no place or proper spot to plug it into the hard drive. There is a 24 Pin spot on the motherboard which I can plug the borrowed cord into, but the only things that fit into the hard drive are a cord labeled "SATA" that comes from the Power Supply Unit, and then an open 8-pin slot (if my memory serves me correctly), of which I do not know what can/would plug into said spot.

Is the cord from the Power Supply Unit all that is needed to hook up? Is there another special cord I need to plug into the 8 pin slot?

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance for your time and help.

You need a SATA cable which would plug into one of the red receptacles on your motherboard and the SATA connection on the hard drive.

The power connector from your PSU to the SATA hard drive is also different from the old 4 pin molex type.

I'll attach images. The red cable is for data and the other for power.

Thank you for your reply! it was extremely helpful.

I do have the power cable already, though I'm not quite sure what type of data cable to get. I was searching on new egg and saw "right angle" data cables. Could you please point me to a cable that would work for my application?

Thank you.

Hello boyinshirt.

This should do the trick for you.

Newegg.com - Nippon Labs 18" (1.5 ft.) SATA II Cable with locking latch Model SATA-L0.5-R - Cables

I'm sure you can find cheaper basic ones but the locking feature on this one is nice.