80 vs 40 wire ide cable

[Gamer007]

How do you tell the difference between the 2 cables? Can you see
each wire on the 80 wire cable, like the 40 wire cable? I tried getting a closer picture of one, but they were all blurry.

I also heard that using the 80 wire (ata66/100) cables, makes drives more stable and quieter? How does it make it quieter? So, I should switch to the 80 wire cables, even if I'm using ata33 devices or cdrom drives...right?

 

[Noriaki]

Uhh...it doesn't make them quieter.

And with ATA66 they introduced a CRC check so in that sense it makes it stabler but using an ATA33 device with an ATA66 cable won't add CRC to it...so I'm not sure what the person meant.

I guess more grounding means that it's less likely to have signal interferance but if that was a problem at 33MB/s speed they would have added the extra ground wires then.

And yes you can tell the difference between 80 and 40 wire cables with visual inspection.

 

[SCSIRAID]

It doesnt make the DRIVE any quieter.. just the IDE singals on the cable. Less external interference.

 

[yiwonder]

You can easily tell the difference. 40 wire cables have individual wires that are about the same size as the floppy cable. 80 wire cables, on the other hand, have wires that are about the size of an individual wire on an audio passthrough cable in your PC.