Question 1

Does this come with a SATA cable or do I need to purchase one on my own?

Accepted Answer

It's a bare drive. It doesn't come with any cables. However, at this price I am okay with that. I just bought a couple of Rosewill SATA cables for like $3. Problem solved.

Question 2

What does bare drive mean?

Accepted Answer

This means it does not come with any additional cables and no rails.  You see what you get.  You must have a set of rails and cables in place in your computer to hook up the drive.  Open up your computer and see if you have a set of rails in the machine.  You can see how the other HD is mounted.  Also see if your computer will actually have an available SATA connection and power connection for the new drive.  If it does not, you will have to buy the additional cables.  
Now, if you are buying this to fit into an external HD box, they usually will accept the bare drive, since the box already has cables. Open box to check if this is the case.

Hope this helped.
Nick

Question 3

Is this drive compatible with my sony 17 inch laptop model VGN-AR270? if so then I would like to buy it.

Accepted Answer

I would say NO.  This is a Desktop computer Drive at 3.5 inches.  All laptops use a 2.5 inch Hard Drive.  Even if you find the 2.5 inch version for laptops, your laptop computer will have to recognize the larger drive.  If the laptop is four or five years old you may have to go back to Sony and download an update to the BIOS, for it to recognize the larger drive.  Before spending the money, research Sony.  
Good Luck
Nick

Question 4

I ordered this drive a couple weeks ago and under my computer it says it has a max of 1.99 TB of space. What happened?

Accepted Answer

What OS are you on? Older systems may not properly see 2TB+ drives. I know OSX 10.6 is needed to see above 2TB. Windows XP (32-bit) is another offender that can't see more than 2TB. I'd check there first!

Question 5

Will this work in my macbook pro 15 inch, rely 2011
2Ghz Intel Core i7
machine?

Accepted Answer

Not if it's a laptop.  The 3.5" hard drives are too large to be an internal drive for a laptop.  2.5" drives are what fit inside laptops.

Question 6

can i use this with my 17.3" laptop?

Accepted Answer

You won't be able to install it internally (too large for a laptop).  However you can use it with your laptop if you install it in an external USB enclosure.  If your laptop has a USB 3 port, get a USB 3 enclosure.  If the laptop has only a USB 2 port, you'll need either a USB 2.0 or a USB 3.0 enclosure.  However, if you are connected to a USB 2.0 port, disk access and transfer speed will suffer substantially.

Question 7

does this use a Sata 2 or Sata 3 connector?

Accepted Answer

I am not sure exactly what you mean.  This hard drive supports SATA 3 when connected to a SATA 3 port on your motherboard.  If all you have is SATA 2 ports, then it runs fine but you will only get SATA 2 speeds.

There are no physical differences in the connectors or cables between SATA1 SATA2 and SATA3.  The speed differences depend on the host bus (the motherboard or the controller card) and the drive controller.

SATA 3 is backwards compatible with SATA 2 and SATA 1 in that a SATA 3 drive will work at SATA 2 speeds when connected to a SATA 2 port and SATA 1 speeds when connected to a SATA 1 port.  Inversely, a SATA 1 drive will run at SATA 1 speed when connected to a SATA 2 or SATA 3 port and a SATA 2 drive will run at SATA 2 speed when connected to a SATA 3 Port

Question 8

Does this work in a Asus X551 MA laptop?

Accepted Answer

Laptops are rather limited in their internal space so they use physically smaller drives than desktops. This is a 3.5" drive which only fits desktop PCs. Laptops use 2.5" or smaller hard drives.

You have to check with the manufacturer to see what physical size drive it takes and what capacity size it can handle, laptops as any PC have a size limit in Megabytes that the software built in can handle. Only newer PCs can handle a 3 TB drive and no laptop can.

Looking briefly at the Asus web site that laptops maximum Hard Disk Capacity is 1 TB

Question 9

Hello,
I recently purchased this item. When I installed the HDD it had two partitions on it, one of which I am unable to do anything with. It shows up as unallocated. I cannot even create a new simple volume with this space.there is a 2048 GB partition, working fine I may add, and a 746.52 GB partition I can do nothing with. Is this a defect in hardware or is there something else going on here? I don't remember ever getting a pre-partitioned hard drive before. Thank you in advance for your time and troubles.
Rich

Accepted Answer

n order for an operating system to fully support storage devices that have capacities that exceed 2 terabytes (2 TB, or 2 trillion bytes), the device must be initialized by using the GUID partition table (GPT) partitioning scheme. This scheme supports addressing of the full range of storage capacity. If the user intends to start the computer from one of these large disks, the system’s base firmware interface must use the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) and not BIOS.
If you don't use UEFI, It won't let you use the full 3 TB's

Question 10

How do I format this HD using its full 3 TB's? Now the capacity reads but 746megs in the one and only partition. 
I have it on a desktop with an AMDx64 2.80 Ghz chipset with 6 gigs of RAM. Found a progran (file) that allows Intel-based computers to utilize 2+ TB's, but none for AMD.
Please help?
Thanking you in advance I am,
Sincerely,
Mike Loucks

Accepted Answer

You are formatting it as a GPT, of course?

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