i hate ide cables!

[willaby]

So, my question is, can anybody point me to a tutorial that explains how to round them? If I can't dispose of them entirely, I could at least make them look a little better and allow for better airflow. I've seen such a tutorial before, but I can't remember where. Your help would be appreciated.

[thekingofpain]

You could buy pre-rounded cables which are pretty cheap these days hows 99˘? http://svc.com/cables.html in the mean time, let them sit in the sun alittle to soften them and simply fold them 3-4 times lengthwise into a tighter ribbon, secure with electrical tape or zipties---no cutting involved---

(You could also switch to SATA drives)

[phenious]

if you got ample time on your hands you can CAREFULLY cut each individual wire apart with an exacto knife then encase in a smaller tube. Just be carefull. Exposing the wires isnt good and its easy to mess up. Its probably faster, and more easy to just order the cables pre-rounded on line.

-: phenious :-

[JPMiller]

its easy to do with minimum chance of ruining them...
http://www.7volts.com/round.htm
realistically you just need to take a razor blade and gently push down into the groove of the ribbon cable at every 4th wire, then with cable facing you pull one side and push the other to split it down the legth, wrap in electrical tape and wallah...rounded cables

[amdkt7]

Rounding is not very good practice as it placed data carrying wires right next to each other. A normal cable has a ground wire acting as a shield between each signal wires.

If you buy a good rounded cable it will have proper shielding around every signal wire. Also, it should not be longer than 18 inches.

I have made my own, but had problems with data (tranfering large files). Many people have done this with out problems, but you are risking data corruption.

If you got to have rounded cables, buy good ones. Or go with SATA hard drives!

[skuz]

Yeah, buy pre-rounded cables. I destroyed 3 cables trying to get them round a few years ago.

After that misadventure, I thought : flat is ok.

[willaby]

Ok, so I ignored the warnings of the naysayers and went ahead and tried it. It's not that hard to make the cuts, then pull apart the rest. I tried it on the floppy cable of my old handout computer, nothing important. However, I have yet to put it back in the computer and try it out...

[butch81385]

even though i have round cables, i found something that looks even nicer..... i saw somone who put the flat cable up against the empty bays and had it folded right up against the case (i will look for a picture)

[willaby]

Yes, I can imagine how this would look nice...however, this is an old computer (the mobo on my nice new one came with rounded cables) and the motherboard/drive configuration is not exactly, shall we say, intuitive...lol...it makes it all but impossible to do such a thing. Not to mention the fact that it's short a cable and I'm forced to use one cable for both the HD and CDROM.

[willaby]

Update: I successfully "shredded" each cable (1 floppy and 1 HD/CDROM), put them in, and they work just fine. Once I get some electrical tape i'll tape them up, they look a little strange inside the case right now lol...