Cables

[shortkid422]

Ok, im just about to buy my rig, but now ive hit a dead spot. I have a few OEM's and will need the cables (duh). So anyways, i was wondering, which cables will i need for the 4 drives (hard, 2 disk, floppy)?
The HD is an IDE. I have a few cables in the list but im not sure if they are right and or what the major diffrence with round ide cables are. and finally, what is the difference or need for 3 heads instead of 2?
Rig

 

[mechBgon]

Most motherboards come with one floppy cable and at least one each of the 40-wire and 80-wire ATA/IDE cables (three-headed). 40-wire IDE cables are suitable for optical drives. 80-wire are suitable for hard drives. Rounded ones are visually fancy.

An IDE cable can have up to two devices besides the motherboard itself, so the three-head cables let you put two drives on one cable. So for your rig, the floppy goes on its own cable, and if you have two IDE hard drives and two IDE optical drives, you can put the hard drives on the 80-wire IDE cable and put the optical drives on the 40-wire IDE cable. Your link isn't working, so I can't tell for sure what you've got cooking there If in doubt, throw one of these into your cart.

 

[MichaelD]

Your shopping cart won't show, but I'll try to help.

First, make sure you're buying IDE cables and not SCSI cables. They are not interchangable.

Three heads vs. two: That's referring to how many drives you can have on a single channel. A standard IDE cable is 18 inches long and has three connectors. Blue one always goes to the motherboard, the connector on the opposite end (furthest from the mobo connector) is the Master device and the middle is for the Slave device, if you have one.

If you look at THIS PIC you will see two-connector (single device) IDE round cables. I bought them from SVC. The bottom cable is a shorty 10-inch. It connects a single HD to the mobo. The longer one is 18 inches long, and is also just a single-device cable. It looks like it connects to something in that bottom 5.25" bay but it doesn't. I just have the extra cable length hidden in there.

Hope this helps.

*edit*

/waves to mechBgon

Hi pal. You beat me to it.

 

[shortkid422]

ok, the link is eddited. lol, those were the cables that i already had in there, lol. thanks for the replies, ill prolly be shopping for 18" rounds