Yes, those cables can be used for any drive past, present and future drives(both oem and retail versions). Usualy the software included in retail box, is entirely unnecessary for the operation of the drive. The programs are intended to do either one of two things: Diagnose and trouble shoot or format and prepare a drive for some beginner who just did this for the first time and does not know the differance between Low Level and High Level formatting or how to copy data from his old hdd to his new one. I never advise anyone to buy OEM HDD's since most of the time the consumer gets screwed out of a warrenty should something go wrong. Trust me I have delt with this many times before. Yes they promise a warranty on OEM, but seldom do they deliver.
You will in the event of an OEM Drive falure get an earful of crap like this "You must deal with the OEM manufacturer since ACME Hard Drive Manufacturing only provides support for Retail Drives, all OEM Problems must be delt with through your OEM Provider" - Good luck on that one because your OEM source sets its own warrenty policy for the drive. OEM drives are more headache than they are worth. Retail Drives have 3-5 years of warrenty vs. a typical 1 year for OEM.
I have a Retail Hitachi 7k250 200GB 8MB Cache and It smokes all other 7,200 rpm drives
(except maxtor 400gb with 16mb cache.. )