I have a question.

I recently went to visit a pc repair shop.

I was there about a job but thats a different story.

I was told something about cables and drives.

I cant remember exactly.

but along these lines.

either an 80 pin cable on a 40 pin drive will kill the 40 pin drive or a 40
pin cable on an 80 pin drive will kill the 80 pin drive.

can anyone clarify this as i had never heard it before.

as I do pc support I wouldnt want to corrupt a drive by accident.

If need be I would rather pay a few bucks to stock up on the 2 types of
cable.

Show quote Hide quote Working on computers everyday, I have used both types of
cable on both types of HDD interchangeably many times,
and have never had any problem. AFAIK, the only reason
80-conductor cables are necessary is to take advantage of
the higher transfer speed possible with ATA100 and above.
The extra 40 conductors in an 80-conductor cable are
shields to prevent cross-talk between the data lines.

Show quote Hide quote that's correct...
if you have an ATA100 or 133 drive...
it will not hurt it to use a 40wire cable...
it just won't operate at it's maximum speed

if you are not sure as to the capability of your HD...
you can always use an 80 wire cable...
it won't hurt anything

Show quote Hide quote One thing the 80 wires seem more fragile to me but maybe thats just
me.  And I think I recall that cable select doesnt work with 40 wire
cables.

I've never had a problem using cable select with the 40 wire cables...

but the 80-wire cables are definately more fragile...

under normal usage they are just fine...

but if one is an experimentor and always changes drives...
the 80 wire cables will break fairly often

Show quote Hide quote No kidding.

See I took the websites at face value when they said that but Ive
never tried it myself.

Not that I care one way or the other .  I never use 40 wire cable
nowadays anyway.

The only reason I would be concerned is if I ran across some guys PC
and he was still using 40 wire and I have a tendency to make
everything cable select cause I sometimes forget which  I made master
and slave and its a real hassle if youve put the HDs back in the cage
and have to look at the jumpers so I naturall set them to CS . . 

Or maybe all the 40 wires are now "special" nowadays.  Not a topic hot
on my list to find out about.


Like here :
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confCS-c.html

Unfortunately, regular 40-conductor IDE/ATA cables don't support cable
select. (Why this came about I do not know, but I suspect that some
bean counter determined they could save five cents on each PC by doing
this.) So to use cable select you need a special cable, and these are
of course non-standard, making them a special purchase. Also, many
people don't understand cable select, nor do they realize it needs a
special cable. If you set both drives to "CS" and then use them on a
regular (non-cable-select) IDE cable, both drives will configure
themselves as "master", causing a configuration conflict.

Show quote Hide quote possibly true...
i think that any 40wire cable i;ve used had been fairly new

I hope whoever told you that wasn't a tech lol

I'm more concerned that someone who actually thinks that they can be a tech
doesn't know this simple bit of information.

Actually not all of them do see here. It is different.  Many sites say
the samething:

A drive setting called cable select has also emerged. In this mode of
operation, the drives automatically configure themselves as master or
slave. This is achieved by cutting wire 28 (on 40 wire cables, or
wires 56 and 57 on 80 wire cables) between the two HDD/CDROM
connectors. Some newer cables have this done internally in the
connectors. In this case, the two connectors are of different colours.

On Sun, 20 Feb 2005 20:05:09 GMT, "J***@Smith.com"
<xxxxs***@newscene.com> wrote:

What happens is  it sees it as a master so if you have one CS
connected I suppose it would work. If you have two it wont. Just tried
it with many of my old 40 wire laying around --- doesnt work with two
CS connected they are right.  



And heres another old one:

80-conductor Ultra DMA cables

Standard IDE/ATA cables are made from the same 40 pin ribbon cables
that have been used in PCs for years, but the high-speed Ultra drives
require a higher quality cable. These are the 80-character cables that
apparently have some kind of extra grounding.

But we understand that these cables -- which are quite a bit more
expensive than the "regular" kind -- are already compatible with CS.
They are typically marked with "Master" and "Slave" ends (in the
optimal positions), and we believe they have done this by pulling pin
28 from the middle connector. These cables can be used in CS
environments or in "regular" environments. Thankfully, no cutting or
soldering is required.

J***@Smith.com wrote:
Show quoteHide quoteThere's a lot of mis-information about drive cables on the net.
Pin, (not wire), 28 is CSEL.  When grounded it sets the drive to master,
when open to slave.  Of course the drives must be jumpered as CS.
Pin 34,(CBLID), is used to tell the motherboard that the drive(s) need a
80 conductor cable for full speed operation.  The alternate ground wires
  change their numeric position depending on which side of the cable has
the first ground wire.  So pin 28 could be connected to either wire 56
or 57. This has led to confusion about "cut wires", etc. I've seen a
"cut" in the wire to pin 34, which is grounded at the MB connector, to
isolate it from the drives.

Many early 40 conductor wires were wired "straight through", so would
not work with cable select.  The number of conductors has nothing to do
with CS, only with operation above ATA33 speed.

With the advent of SATA this will all be moot! :-)

On Sun, 20 Feb 2005 21:20:37 GMT, VWWall <vw***@DEADearthlink.net>
wrote:

Im sure weve now posted more than anyone wants to know about 40 wire
cables and CS but perhaps some day if anyone is stranded on a desert
island and needs to use an old 40 wire with two HDs with jumpers
frozen on the CS position --- all these posts will prove invaluable.

J***@Smith.com wrote:

Aw, don't stop now - I was just about to reminisce about ST506 and ESDI
standards! A pox on this new-fangled IDE rubbish.

/mel/ wrote:
Show quoteHide quoteWould you like me to tell you how to do a "real" low-level format on a
ST506, and pick the best interleave? :-)

VWWall wrote:

Sure, you need to run debug and manually execute the format code on the
drive controller card BIOS - usually it's at offset 5 (and the card is at
$c800).

As for interleave - I just used to use Spinrite as that was much faster than
actually calculating it or working it out by trial and error. An alternative
was the early Norton Utilities, back in the day when they were useful for
something.

Show quote Hide quote 1/ All IDE (ATA) drives have a 40pin connector
2/ The cables for ATA66/100/133 speeds use 80 wires 40 of them being shields
to stop cross talk
3/ using either cable type on any ATA drive will not damage it but the
faster drives will slow down with the 40 wire cable.
4/ Some bios setups will tell you when a 40wire cable is being used on a
drive that requires an 80 wire cable, this will not stop the machine from
working.
5/ 80 pin SCA SCSI, 68 pin SCA SCSI use a "d" type connector which will not
fit an IDE drive.

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