Question 1

Does this drive come with the necessary cables?  Building my first machine on my own.  Need to know if I need e d to budget for cables well

Accepted Answer

No. Mine didn't, and I never remember any internal hard drives ever coming with cables.  Cables in general are usually supplied with a new computer case and new power supplies.  This is a SATA drive so you would need either a SATA cable for connecting to a SATA Mother Board or a SATA adapter if your connecting it to the old IDE cable Mother Boards.  They also have SATA power adapters for connecting the old three plug power supply connector to the Hard Drive.  The cables aren't expensive nor or the adapters.  Research first what you'll need.

Question 2

Will this work in a Dell Inspiron 530 desk top?

Accepted Answer

The hard drive you are looking to buy is worth more than the cpu you are using. Are you going to use this hard drive as a back up only? Are you using it for your main drive & replacing the drive in your current cpu? If you are installing this drive in your current cpu, then look at the connection on your current hard drive & see if it is a SATA connection. If so, it will work, but if you are replacing your current drive you will need an Operating system. Considering your outdated system, you should consider a new system. This hard drive is a good choice in any new system you plan to build.

Question 3

What is the difference between this dive and the other very similar drive which doesn't have an "M" in its model name (WD2000FYYZ ) ? Also advantages or disadvantages to this drive over the same priced SAS version (WD200MFYYG ). I am using an Areca 882ix-12 4GB Re 3.0.   Thanks

Accepted Answer

Don't know if it helps but the model number you provided without the "M" is for a SAS drive with 32mb cache and the one with the "M" is for a SATA drive with 64mb cache. Two very different drives. The SAS drive is a faster technology regarding drive speed than SATA though in most implementations you won't necessarily see the difference, especially in a RAID configuration that uses striping (6, 5, 1, etc). The cache difference will help you if you have a lot of write-intensive operations and you have the drive setup to use the write cache. In this case the Areca has 6gb of cache (HUGE) so the drive cache doesn't really matter. Since the SATA and SAS drives are nearly the same price, and the Areca has 6gb of cache on it, I'd go for the SAS drives; you'll have faster read times.

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