are there ata cables with larger spacing?

[lozina]

I've got a situation where I have 3 hardrives and 1 cdrom, all on the ATA interface. My mobo has 2 ATA slots, which owuld be perfect except that there is quite a distance between my hardrives and my cdrom, and every cable i have allows only like 6 inches of distance between the two devices it's conencted to. What can I do?

I actually had a spare ATA controller card which I plugged in (annoying though cause now I got it's startup delay while booting) but the realy problem is- I hooked up my cdrom to it and my computer will not recognize a boot disk in the cdrom like this. Only when I hook up the cdrom to my motherboard directly can it recognize it and boot off a cd...

 

[JimPhelpsMI]

Hi, If you are using standard ribbon cable or any NON-CABLE SELECT cable, you can sometimes get better "Reach" by putting the center connector to the MB. I'm pretty sure you can find the cable you need. I have a supply of ribbon cable and connectors. In that situation I usually make up the cable I need. Luck, Jim

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

And there are places online that do custom cables. If you really need it, you can find it online.
Tas.

 

[jackschmittusa]

If you have an extra 5½ bay, you can use an adapter kit ($2 maybe) to to mount your hard drive there, making it much closer.

 

[Zepper]

There are 24" and other size ATA cables in both round and flat (you don't want to mess with the older 40-wire cables any more). The longer cables have more space between the drive connectors, but that varies too so you need to know how much distance you need and make sure to get one to fit. 80-wire cables only work one way - blue to mobo etc... And there is no guarantee that cables longer than 18" will work anyway in many cases and if the cable you get is warranted to work, it may still cost more than the cable to send it back if it doesn't
. You didn't mention what case you have - is it one of those with the side-saddle HD bays? I recommend not getting those as it exacerbates the HD to Optical drive distances thus requiring special cables (even in cases that have the HDs in the normal orientation it can be quite a stretch). Or you can adapt the HDs into the optical drive bays.
. I recommend getting the side-saddle cases only if you are using SATA or SCSI HDs. - or are willing to go the one drive per channel route - which is the best performance solution anyway.

.bh.