ATA100 cable - Does the master device REALLY have to go on the black connector?

[raz]

It's a pain in the arse to connect the master and slave to the black and grey respectively. In order to do it I had to move my hard drive up to the next bay below my floppy (I had it 2 bays below the floppy so it could get more air circulation), and had to move my slave device (DVD) to the lowest 5 1/4 bay. Even then the cable wasn't long enough until I cut/rounded it...and then it BARELY was long enough (it's tighter than a b*tch!) It's a standard 18" cable and I really don't want to buy a longer cable because I've read that anything longer than 18" is out of spec and could degrade the signal.

 

[CrimsonWolf]

No, it doesn't matter. All that matters is that you have the drives at the correct jumper setting.

 

[Blayze]

it doesn't matter
I have used it both ways and it works fine.
No problems, and it makes it a lot easier to connect your drives sometimes

 

[raz]

Thanks guys.

 

[WarCon]

It will read as the secondary drive to the ATA controller chip, but as long as its the only thing on that cable it will still act as boot drive.

 

[WarCon]

I just really read your post. Are you using a non ATA/100 device (your DVD) on the same cable? Why would you wanna degrade your hard drives performance, by putting on the same signal path as something that will be talking much slower. Never a good idea to put a cdrom type device on same cable as hard drive.

 

[tracerbullet]

I was doing it in the past so I could put CD ROM and Burner on two cables to be able to do it directly, without going to the hard drive first. Kind of depends on what you use your computer for - if you surf and play music on it, it ain't a bad set up. (Moved since to RAID and yeah, big big difference with RAID and no CD's on those channels).

You probably know this, but the blue end must go into the board. ATA 100 runs at either 33 or 66, forget whcich, but NOT at full speed if the cables are flipped. The drives work, but slowly.

 

[raz]

Well I fired up Sandra and ran some benchmarks on my hard drive with and without the DVD, and connected to the black and grey connector. Here's the results:

*With the DVD on the same channel and the hard drive connected to the...
Black = 19333
Grey = 19361

*Without the DVD hooked up and the hard drive connected to the...
Black = 19362
Grey = 19337

So it looks like neither which color the hard drive is connected to, nor whether or not the DVD is on the same channel, has any effect on the hard drive's performance. This thread seems to verify my conclusion.