Can I plug in an IDE cable the wrong way (sort of)

[Eratosthenes]

I?m hooking up a 16x burner and a 16x DVD drive on the same IDE cable for the new system I?m building. From the way the case is laid out though, it?s impossible to have the middle (master IDE receticle) plug into the DVD drive which I want to be the master. Can I plug in (as per the cable) the burner as master and the dvd as a slave and have that overruled by the jumper settings. In short are jumpers stronger than the position? Thanks.

Era

 

[SocrPlyr]

yes you can... just as long as you don't care about ata66 or ata100 but most cdroms and burners and dvdroms don't support over ata33...

if u need more info just ask

Josh

 

[Eratosthenes]

uh well actually I do... I've using a Pioneer 106s Dvd drive which is supposedly ATA66. Maybe it doesn't make I diff but I like to know I have the power.

What exactly will hooking them up the wrong way do?

Thanks.

Era

 

[Steven the Leech]

I have read that on the ata66 cables the master is on the black/slave on the gray. Never have tried it any other way. Have hooked up a ata33 to a device that was ata66/100 and didnt see any decrease in preformance in the faster drive. The jumpers will over rule any "order" but the cable will affect the settings [not sure how] probably a performance decrease, and with a burner would probably produce coasters.


Longer IDE cable or a controller card may be a solution

 

[Mark0999]

Once you slave a slower device to a faster one, the faster device will run at the slower speed anyway.

 

[RossGr]

For IDE devices cable position does not matter, the master/slave status is set up by the jumpers, plug the drives into which ever position on the cable you need.

 

[TNTrulez]

Yea that's what I thought too RossGr.

 

[atom]

Well, it depends really. If your drives are jumpered to cable select, then the position on the cable matters doesn't it?

 

[DoctorBooze]

If you set the jumpers on the drives so one drive is master, the other slave, it doesn't matter which plugs on the cable they're on. If you set the jumpers on the drives to "Cable Select", then the one with the black plug gets to be master, and the one with the grey plug gets to be slave. The cables are made with the black plug in the middle because UDMA/33 (and higher) drives don't want to be a long way from the controller; while it ought to work, you may find UDMA/100 and perhaps even UDMA/66 unreliable right at the end of the cable. The expectation was, you fit your UDMA/xx hard drive near the controller, and your DMA or PIO CD drive at the end where it's less affected by cable length.

Mark0999: Mixing devices of different speeds on one cable is supported fine by most chipsets. Don't let anyone tell you that hooking a UDMA/33 CD on the same cable as a UDMA/100 hard drive makes the hard drive run at UDMA/33. It's just not true. Of course the CD drive will take three times as long to transfer the same amount of data, and the aggregate effect will be that the hard drive appears to go slower than if you had an (otherwise similar) UDMA/100 CD drive, but that's not what's actually happening.

If you don't believe me, put a UDMA/66 hard drive on the same cable as an old Iomega ZIP 100 IDE (only does PIO mode 0, that's about 3MB/s); the hard drive will still zip along nicely until you try and access the ZIP drive at the same time, when everything will appear to go dead slow.

 

[SocrPlyr]

ok let me clarify my previous post...
for ata33 copliant drives w/ a 40pin 40conductor ide cable there is not right or wrong way to hook it up...
for ata66/100 copliant drives w/ a 40pin 80conductor ide cable the blue end must be placed in the controller on the motherboard... (i do not know the exact reason for this but i believe it has to do w/ something about the extra 40 grounds not being hooked up properly if you reverse the cable... i have played around w/ it and the blue connector must be in the mobo, otherwise the bios will report no 80conductor cable is present... i have tried in many machines of different modles and harddrives too...)

now back to his question
i bet neither of his drives (well at least one of them - they are cdroms) will not support ata66/100 so even if using the ata66/100 cable it makes no difference which way the cable is positioned... the drives couldn't use the bandwidth anyways...

Josh

 

[DoctorBooze]

SocrPlyr - absolutely right, if you have a UDMA (80-conductor) cable, you must put the blue end in the motherboard to get UDMA operation. Sorry if I managed to throw in any more confusion earlier!

 

[elkinm]

I reomend seting the master slave jumpers on the drives instead of cable select and you chould have no problems. It is true that if ATA100 or ATA66 devices are to far away it may leed to data corruption most good cables are not long enough to ccause any problems and initialy specs said that DMA/66 would only work with other 66 capable devices but that was a long time ago and now you should not have any problems with that and anyway I don't believe the 16X DVD not the burner in question support even UDMA/66 so it doesn't realy matter.

If you realy want you can go out and buy a cable that would fit the way you want as soem are directed diferently.