when you buy an internal HDD does the data cable come with it or is it extra?

also what's better
Seagate SATAII 500GB 16m Cache or
Western Digital 500G SATAII 7200rpm HDD 32M

don't need any other sizes it's for a back room PC that's used infrequently (media streaming and surfing) but is worth fixing as my current HDD has died. if you have another option at 500GB that's around $60-$80 I'll look at that

thx all

mine did not come with any cables.

Usually comes with the mobo not the drive, iirc

No you won't get a cable.

And I dunno what's better.

No you won't get a cable, that'll come with your motherboard
and get the Western Digital, the Seagate 500gb drives have been plagued with problems, and they claim to have fixed them, but a customer of mine bought 8 for 2xRaid5 arrays and 5 have been returned.

thx guys.
no cable hardware it's an oldish system (about 5 years) so i don;t have all the bits left over. was on a IDE HDD but the board has 2 x SATA free so thought I'd convert as I'm told it's better?
and i guess the 32M cache on the WD must mean it's twice as good as the 16M?
yep total noob here........
i found the old manuals for the board and putting the system together (it's a shuttle Xpc from computer alliance) so going to attempt my first HDD changeover.

they'll probably sell you the cable, maybe even just give you one hopefully
cache only plays a very small role in overall hard drive performance, but yes 32mb is better than 16mb too.

http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.9858

If you can afford to wait a while. Much cheaper than the $15 Umart wanted for one.

^ why wait

http://cgi.ebay.com.au/45CM-SATA-SERIAL-ATA-HD-DATA-HARD-DRIVE-SIGNAL-CABLE_W0QQitemZ170420496875QQcmdZViewItemQQptZAU_Components?hash=item27adda69eb

$15 for a sata cable, lawl.

%7 from CA if you can't somehow talk the sales guy into giving it to you for free.

woops to late
i'd have to wait for either of those want to fix it on the weekend
thx anyway

I've had both WD and Seagate drives fail. Triple redundancy back-ups ftmfw! Sometimes it pays to have a little bit of an obsessive nature about ya ;-) Not often, but sometimes.

I'll give you the f***ing sata cable

f*** people that charge for them

Get seagate, 2 syllables is better than 5, everyone knows that