Hard drive power cable issue

[phlip67]

Right. I am trying to build my first computer (yay me), and I ran into some problems. So far, all the parts that I have, I have gotten for free, so I wanted to continue that trend for the hard drive. I had an old laptop that I am no longer using, so I decided to try using its hard drive for my new computer. I have an adapter for 2.5-3.5 inch IDE drives, but the power cable that is attached to said adapter has only the red and black wires (2 out of the 4 connectors have wires). are the other ones (yellow) necessary, or can they be skipped?

Also, would there be any particular way that I would need to arrange the jumpers on my laptop hard drive, and how would I go about doing so.

thanks for your replies in advance

Phlip671

New comp specs:
-Asus Tusi-M motherboard (given to me by a friend's dad). the mobo already had a celeron processor and heatsink attached.--350-Watt PSU
-Being short on cash, I decided that I would use the motherboard's built-in video chipset for the time being (upgrade in future)
-512 mb RAM
-30GB laptop hard drive
-integrated sound card

(as a side note, anyone got any suggestions on a cheap graphics card? Not anything top of the line, think 50-60 bucks.

 

[Ididmyc600]

A 2.5 inch drive only uses the red and black as they run on 5v this means they can be plugged into the USB and ran from the 5v on the USB bus, the yellow wires carry the 12v needed for 3.5 inch drives.

However 2.5 inch drives very rarely have jumpers on them (some do and they are tiny little things) this means the PC would only see it as Master, so bear that in mind when adding any other drives especially those that require the master to be set to have a slave or else it wont work properly.

 

[phlip67]

thanks. I read my HDD's label, and it said 5 volts input. thats one less problem to deal with.

thanks for the reply