Replacing a legacy WD drive with a new one

WD Internal Drives Desktop & Mobile Drives
1

My Ma has an eight year old P4 machine with an old 40 gig WD400 in it. The drive failed last week. So I bought an WD5000AAKX to replace it. I understand that the MOBO might NOT recognize the drive because the WD400 is a 1.5 gig transfer rate and the new one is 6 gig transfer… That’s not my issue. The old drive just had the skinny sata interface cable attached to it. However, the install instructions for the new one seems to insinuate that it NEEDS a power cable also. I wanna know if the new one needs a power cable or not. And why did the old one only need the one cable attached. See below for the pic… the drive on the left is the WD400. the pic on the right is the representation of the WD5000AAKX

Thanks all

SATA DRIVE.jpg
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2

Hi yes the new one needs a power cable. The older one should have also although  it may have been the molex connector type. I am sure you know what a molex connector is but the new drive would only use a sata power connection as shown in your picture.

3

Thanks for reply… No the old WD on the left just had the data cable… No MOLEX cable at all

Sure would like to get a Guru in here and explain why the first generation SATA did not require cable…

Thanks