Bill Ridgeway said:
I have seen advice on what to do on seeing a "no 80 conductor cable
installed" error message. However, (trying to get it right in the first
place and avoid the error) I haven't seen anything definitive on
identifying when an 80 conductor cable is required.
A coloured socket on the
motherboard is, presumably, only an indicator that it is supported by the
motherboard but how are hard disks, CD, CDR, DVD etc identified?.
Also, I haven't seen anything on the effect of installing an 80 way cable
when it is not needed / supported.
I have also seen some general advice on whether master / slave drives
should be in the middle or the end of a ribbon cable.
Bill Ridgeway
Computer Solutions
Pegasus response...
An 80-conductor cable improves the speed of data transfer between
the disk and the motherboard. If your motherboard supports the
higher speed then it will notify you that you should use an 80-core
cable. However, it will work perfectly well with a 40-core cable, just
a little less fast.
80-core cables work perfectly well in a system that does not recogise
them. You simply won't get any improvement in speed.
It does not matter (whether master / slave drives hould
be in the middle or the end of a ribbon cable).
PCDaddy said:
You can use an 80 pin cable with a 40 pin setup but not a 40 with an 80.
You will lose many functions of a device and probably get errors. On the
mother board, there are two black ide sockets, one nearest to the edge
of the mobo and one on the side of it. If you get an error for an 80
pin, then you probably have a 40 pin cable hooked to an 80 pin device.
An 80 pin has finer and more lines, wires if you will. When hooking up
your cd\dvd\whatever you have, it should go on the secondary cable,
which is the one NOT closest to the edge of the mobo. If you want a dvd
drive to be first you would hook it to the top plug on the ide cable, if
you want it to be senond drive, hook it to the middle of the ide cable.
Hard drives should be on the primary cable, master hd should be on top
plug of primary ide, slave drive on middle plug of primary ide(closest
to edge of mobo.) Something is obviously causing you to get this error,
a drive or something is needing an 80 pin cable. You need to give a bit
more info on what you were\did do. Install something change something?
let me know.
Bill:
The bottom line in all this is that you should be using *only* 80-wire IDE
cables for connecting *all* your IDE/ATAPI devices. The cost between a
40-wire and 80-wire IDE cable is trifling and there's simply no point in
stocking your shop/workplace with 40-wire IDE cables. It's a pity that
retail, boxed optical drives are still packaged with 40-wire cables just to
save a few pennies. There is *no* downside using 80-wire IDE cables with
*all* of your devices, while there can be with a 40-wire cable. And since
the cost between the two is negligible, my advice is to use *only* 80-wire
cables. The shop that I worked in routinely consigned all 40-wire cables
they came across to the junk bin.
As to distinguishing between the two types of cables -- there's no label on
the cable telling you whether it's a 40-wire or 80-wire cable -- those of us
who have worked with these two types of cables can (usually) immediately
tell which is which simply by looking at them. If you compare both types
side-by-side you'll spot the difference with little difficulty.
As far as connecting your IDE/ATAPI devices, other than connecting your
booting HD as Primary Master (in nearly all cases), it makes little
difference performance-wise how the remainder of your devices are connected
to the motherboard's IDE connectors. Tests conducted by the facility I was
associated with have borne this out. I know you will hear & read (as you
already have) that this or that drive should be connected to this or that
IDE connector for better performance but in the tests we carried out in
virtually every case (there were some very rare exceptions) it simply didn't
matter. And it's easy enough to conduct your own tests on the machine you're
using to verify this. Perhaps needless to say, we are talking about "modern"
devices, i.e., drives manufactured during the past four or five years.
As to your question re the drive's position on the middle or end connector
of the IDE cable - as Pegasus has stated, it (*usually*) doesn't matter in
most cases assuming your device is correctly jumpered. Obviously if you're
using Cable Select, then the device's position on the cable most certainly
*is* critical. I assume you understand this. Also, many knowledgeable
technicians avoid the "dangling terminator", i.e., if only one device is
connected on the IDE cable they will invariably connect it to the end
connector and not the middle one. I do the same myself, but I really can't
confirm that it's necessary.
Anna
