Thanks for the reply.
I still ordered a new Western Digital.......with the newer more secure
connection cable thats supposed to fit the older drives as well.
thanks again
(sigh of relief)
peter
"BananaOfTheNight" wrote in
message ...
could/would someone kindly look at the SATA pins where the SATA connector
goes and tell me if the pins are all the same lenght or are some shorter than
others??

They are designed so that some pins are longer than others - the ground wires
(and possibly power as well, but I don't know). This is just like USB - so
that you can hot-plug a SATA device. I haven't tried it yet (don't want to
risk killing a 200 gig Seagate), but hot-plugging was designed into the SATA
interface right from the start.

Also from what I've seen, SATA connectors aren't held in as strongly as I
would like - they seem to always be a couple of degrees away from flat. It's
quite easy to knock a SATA plug out, but since it was designed to be that way,
there's no cause to worry. If you knocked a standard IDE/ATA cable out, then
that's a whole different story...