Are IDE ribbon cables 'bi-directional'?

[Googer]

Originally posted by: jaqie

Originally posted by: Googer
No, they are omnidirectional. The IDE bus does not allow a device to read while it's being written to. The device must stop reading or writing to change operations. SCSI is bi-directional and can read as well as write with out having to change operations, SAS is also the same way.

I think you are confusing synchronous and asyncronous with directionals there.

Thanks, I've been having trouble remembering lately.

 

[JackMDS]

Originally posted by: Googer

Originally posted by: JackMDS
All the cables in the world are bi-directional.

No, they are omnidirectional. The IDE bus does not allow a device to read while it's being written to

That is the decision of the device to use the Cable one Direction at the time.

Cables beside being Bidirectional do not make decisions.

However if you consider an Antenna a Cable then you are Right it is Omni Directional.

 

[LurkingInNC]

ok, I reread posts and think I understand things, thanks for the educational input.

jaqie/ OO: most of the problems reviewers reported w.r.t. SYBA cards were related to connecting optical drives rather than HDs. Just curious as to your use, i.e., number of ODs vs. HDs you've hooked up to the SYBA cards? You mentioned that you keep several cards around, any problems with failure or are those mostly for new applications?

Thanks.

 

[jaqie]

No problems whatsoever. I am using one in my dual Intel STL2 P3/933, and it works great. The catch with *ALL* add-in ATA cards is most don't work at all with optical drives. The solution is very, very easy, though. Run all hard drives off of the card. I run optical drives off of the mobo pata channels, and/or usb adapters, though that is a little less reliable across all motherboards as for booting off of them.
With an already installed OS, this method works quite well 98% of the time: install the card without any drives on it, or with a single drive you don't care about on it (as some cards won't activate without a drive on them). Then install windows drivers for the card on next boot... then shut down the system and move the hard drive to the card. Make sure the bios is set to boot from those drives (methods vary, some can detect the drive directly and you just tell it to boot from those in the HDD boot order menu, some you have to tell it to boot to an external card). Upon next boot windows will set itself up so that it uses the drive properly in it's new location (even if the OS is on that drive) as long as it is windows 2000 or newer. With 98 and older, it is a transparent change.