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JohnE. · 01-29-2004, 05:37 PM

You may have noticed most new ATA66 or higher drives come with the jumpers on Cable Select by default. Hard drive manufacturers anticipate buyers will be using an 80-conductor cable and this is the recommended arrangement. I'm not sure about other manufacturers but all my Maxtor drives have been this way out of the bag.

All my systems use 80-conductor cables and Cable Select for all IDE devices, including ATA33 optical drives (CD-ROM, CD-RW, DVD, etc). The 40 extra ground wires act as a sheild for the other 40 (data) wires, reducing crosstalk, which reduces data transmission errors and is beneficial to all IDE devices, and especially to CD/DVD burners. With 80-conductor cables being so cheap it's an easy system tweak

I posted a link to a very good article about this subject in another IDE thread... I'll see if I can find it again and put it here. Found it: IDE/ATA Configuration and Cabling

01-29-2004, 05:37 PM	#10 (permalink)
JohnE. Registered User Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: Vancouver, BC Canada Posts: 850	You may have noticed most new ATA66 or higher drives come with the jumpers on Cable Select by default. Hard drive manufacturers anticipate buyers will be using an 80-conductor cable and this is the recommended arrangement. I'm not sure about other manufacturers but all my Maxtor drives have been this way out of the bag. All my systems use 80-conductor cables and Cable Select for all IDE devices, including ATA33 optical drives (CD-ROM, CD-RW, DVD, etc). The 40 extra ground wires act as a sheild for the other 40 (data) wires, reducing crosstalk, which reduces data transmission errors and is beneficial to all IDE devices, and especially to CD/DVD burners. With 80-conductor cables being so cheap it's an easy system tweak I posted a link to a very good article about this subject in another IDE thread... I'll see if I can find it again and put it here. Found it: IDE/ATA Configuration and Cabling __________________ Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink. Know what I mean? Say no more. Last edited by JohnE. : 01-30-2004 at 08:09 AM.