Can 80-pin IDE cables be used "backwards?"

[Def]

I recently purchased a 2nd hard drive for my rig. That would make four total IDE devices in my machine, so I initially planned to run 1 hard drive per channel as the master, then one optical drive as a slave.

However, to get this setup I had to run the 80-pin IDE cables "backwards," with the longer section of cable between the harddrive and CDROM drive(thus the blue connector that is normally on the motherboard is connected to the CDROM drive).

After doing this, I get an error code saying that there is not an 80-pin cable on both the channels. The performance was also terrible in this configuration.

I was under the impression that this was possible and that I had done this before(guess I'm mistaken).



I'm currently running my 2 hard drives on the same IDE channel, and while it is definitely snappy(2 spindles kills 1 for multitasking), I feel I'm leaving a bit on the table with the two hard drives contending for the same channel.

Thanks in advance!

 

[corkyg]

The problem you describe is because the 80-wire ribbons are all Cable Select capable - this means that the end connectors have some wires cut, and that would screw up the controller port.

 

[dakarm]

It might work but then again it might not.

Only way to find out is to try it. I would not use cable select but instead jumper each device as master and slave.

 

[Mday]

IT WONT WORK!

the 80 wire cables are fixed in terms of what you can plug in. the blue goes to the controller, the black goes to the master, the grey goes to the slave. (the latter two are kinda "optional")

 

[bozo1]

What Mday said is correct. You can't use them backwards. It's not an 80 conductor cable issue, it's simply the fact that the cables are keyed to be used in a 'cable select' setup if you wish. You'd run into the same problem with a 40 conductor 'cable select' cable.