IDE Cable question

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StylingPaT

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I just recently got into building computers (just built my second yesterday) and right now I'm trying to clean up the birds nest I got of IDE cables and such. I'm about to purchase a round IDE cable

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16812183043

Now it has 3 connections on it. All I have that uses IDE in my computer is my 1 CD-ROM drive and then my HD. With that, would I plug one end into my CD-ROM, the middle into my HD and then the other end into my motherboard? Cuz right now they are on seperate IDE cables. Anyone be able to clear this up for me :eek:
 
what you said is correct...

you plug it into the motherboard, one into the hard drive, and the other into the cd drive... or if you had two cables like that, you could have two hard drives on one line... and two optical drives on the other...

keep in mind you have to set the hard drive to primary and the cd drive to slave...
 
I think thats how it is aready set up in my bios. If I plug the IDE into both, will I know if I set up my slave and master wrong?
 
jumpers_master_closeup_cr_sm.jpg


look for something like that on the back of the hard drive and cd drive...

somewhat self explainatory...
 
correct me if im wrong, i always thought you should keep your HD on one channel and your optical drives on another. I thought if you have a HD and CD-rom drive on the same cable, the transfer rate will default to the slowest item connected to it. so say you have a old cd rom thats ATA 33, wouldnt that make the HD run at 33 instead of 100 or 133?
 
:confused:

thats never happened to me... I have two hard drives on one channel (ide1) and a dvd and cd drive on the other(ide 2)

I don't see any significant speed decrease...
 
i cant say for sure, ive never tried putting both on the same cable since most motherboards have at least 2 IDE channels anyways, but i've been told by many not to put optical and HD on the same channel, maybe an urban comp myth or something i dunno haha, well to OP i say if you only have 1 channel, do what juice daddy says, if you 2 channels on your mobo, just buy 2 cables.

Also, no need buying thermaltake cables, and if you buying more than 1 cable, neweggs shipping is all screwy, try lil mod shops like these:

http://www.jab-tech.com/Dual-Device-rounded-IDE-c-24.html
http://www.petrastechshop.com/24.html
 
doodle dee said:
correct me if im wrong, i always thought you should keep your HD on one channel and your optical drives on another. I thought if you have a HD and CD-rom drive on the same cable, the transfer rate will default to the slowest item connected to it. so say you have a old cd rom thats ATA 33, wouldnt that make the HD run at 33 instead of 100 or 133?

That has been the mantra for the past fifteen years or so. I should do an experiment to see how valid that is nowadays...

At any rate, the idea is that if the slower CDROM is using the channel, then the HDD has to wait until the channel is freed up before it can do its thing. If we are talking transfers between the CDROM and the HDD on the same IDE cable, then that can slow things down considerably.

One of the advantages of the SATA specification is that each drive has its own channel and this problem is eliminated.

If we are talking about having two HDDs and a CDROM, then it would make sense to place the second HDD on the same channel as the CDROM rather than with the other HDD because of teh same truism-- on different IDE channels, both drives can write at the same time (nearly, let's not get into the serial-task nature of computers here). THis is particularly useful if the second drive happens to carry the swap file on it.
 
While it's true that you can run a IDE HDD & ATAPI OPTICAL DRIVE on the same IDE Channel, why would you want two devices to share the same bandwidth of one IDE channel? Doesn't make much sense to me? There are two IDE channels on motherboards, "Primary and Secondary" Both channels have their own bandwidth bus. They also use seperate IRQ's (Primary uses 14 and Secondary uses 15 or sometimes 10) I'd recommend using both for optimal performance.

Spend another $4.75 and get a second rounded IDE cable.
Also, you're getting a 24" cable. Unless you have a HUGE full tower or SERVER case... 18" is normally more then enough...
 
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