Connecting an old HDD

Anyone know how to connect an old HDD to the motherboard?

I have a 'Western digital' 4TB drive from about 2019, which I need to be able to reconnect via a sata cable to the current WD 8TB drive. They are similar in height and width. But I have no idea whereabouts I need to plug it into on the ASUSTEk P8Z77-M PRO motherboard.

I have trying to find out for months now.

For what it's worth, I'm using Win 10.

Can anyone assist please?

I need to be able to reconnect via a sata cable to the current WD 8TB drive.

power from the psu and sata data cable from the sata port on the mobo.

each hd has a separate power cable and data cable.

unless you meant something else by "plug it in "

Welcome to TenForums!

I can help you with that.

When you say that you need to connect the 4TB drive to your current 8TB drive using a SATA cable, that's not actually an accurate description of what needs to be done. SATA drives attach one drive to a SATA connector. There is no daisy-chaining or linking multiple drives together via cable. Each drive gets its own SATA cable and power connection. Note that a power cable may sometimes have more than one connection, so it's possible to connect power to multiple drives using only one cable.

The user guide for your MB shows that you have six SATA ports in total. SATA ports 1 and 2 are SATA III capable of 6 Gbps speed while ports 3 through 6 are SATA II which are capable of 3 Gbps speeds. Note that SATA III drives can still be connected to a SATA II port, but peak transfer speeds are limited, although, depending upon what you are doing, you may not even notice.

My suggestion would be to connect both your 8TB and 4 TB drives to ports 1 and 2 if those are the only two drives in the system.

If you need any further assistance, please do let us know!

Use a HDD enclosure,they are inexpensive and simple to install and use their own power supply.
I have used one for a few years without a hitch.It is---Nextech 3.5" SATA HDD Enclosure USB 3.0.Bought from a reputable shop,not online.

UPDATE: I didn't notice initially that your MB actually has 2 additional SATA ports on the rear panel. These are both SATA III (6 Gbps).

It looks like your motherboard has 6 SATA ports:



You would connect the hard drive to one of the SATA ports using a SATA data cable. Then you would need to find a spare SATA power connector from the PSU to connect to the hard drive power connection. Each SATA drive will have two connections - one for data to the motherboard and one from the power supply unit to the hard drive for power.

MT269 said:

Anyone know how to connect an old HDD to the motherboard?

I have a 'Western digital' 4TB drive from about 2019, which I need to be able to reconnect via a sata cable to the current WD 8TB drive.

Perhaps this is your misconception. Old IDE hard drives had master and slave settings and two hard drives could be connected to the same cable. SATA hard drives are not daisy chained. They each have their own data cable attached to their own SATA port on the motherboard.

NavyLCDR said:

It looks like your motherboard has 6 SATA ports

Actually, it has 8. I missed it the first time myself, but this MB has a unique feature in that it has another 2 SATA ports on the back panel. Both of those are SATA III ports. I missed that in my first response but had to reply a second time after I spotted that.