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error msg: "Primary IDE channel no conductor 80 cable installed

L

leggomyeggroll

Member
i'm getting this message when i boot up (during the first screen where it detects my IDEs). i usually keep my computer on 24/7 so i don't notice this message, and usually the first screen just blazes through so i must've missed it in the past.

so i did a little googling about it and it seems that it might be because i might be using a 40 wire instead of an 80 wire. i do recall my IDE connector broke so i switched the cable. i never knew about 40 and 80 wire. but i'm concluding that i might be using a 40 wire cable. can somebody confirm that? i've used it for a good 4 months at least without any problems. is it actually safe that i use a 40 in place of an 80? i do plan to change it eventually if that's the reason why i'm getting that message, but just feeling a bit lazy at the moment to find an 80 wire.

thanks in advance for any relevant replies.
 
80 wire cables are required for ATA66, ATA100 or ATA133 operation. Using a 40 wire cable limits you to ATA33 speeds, although it will work fine at that speed. You lose out on burst data transfer speeds which can easily hit 75 to 100MBps with hard drives made in the last couple of years, and even continuous data transfer can beat the 33MBps limit with many drives. So you're probably getting large performance losses; whether it's noticeable depends entirely on what you're doing, however even simple application loading would probably be noticeably faster if you used the right cable.

80 wire cables are visibly different than 40 wire; the individual wires are thinner, and of course there are twice as many. You're definitely using a 40 wire cable if the BIOS says that. If you happen to be using an 80 wire cable on the secondary channel (which from your other post only has optical drives) you could just swap them, as optical drives are all limited to ATA33 speeds anyway.
 
An 80-wire cable will allow your drives to use faster protocols than UltraATA/33.
 
thanks lord and mech for the heads up. i did look at a picture before posting here, and i agree the 80 has thinner wires thus leaving twice as many of them. i closed my case before looking at the picture and im too lazy to open it up to look at the cable to see if it's the 40 wire. but i'm betting that's the reason. well if the only set back is the loss of performance i'm going to stick with it until i have some free time to get myself a new cable. i dont know if the cable i use for the optical drives are 80 or 40 either, but if it is a 80 then i'll go ahead and swap the two.

right now i dont do much on the computer other than hwk, programming, and gaming. the former two take little resource, whereas the gaming probably would like to hog more performance. i play BF2 a lot and i find the loading particularly slow. hopefully after changing the cable i'll see a difference.

thanks again.
 
Originally posted by: leggomyeggroll
thanks lord and mech for the heads up. i did look at a picture before posting here, and i agree the 80 has thinner wires thus leaving twice as many of them. i closed my case before looking at the picture and im too lazy to open it up to look at the cable to see if it's the 40 wire. but i'm betting that's the reason. well if the only set back is the loss of performance i'm going to stick with it until i have some free time to get myself a new cable. i dont know if the cable i use for the optical drives are 80 or 40 either, but if it is a 80 then i'll go ahead and swap the two.

right now i dont do much on the computer other than hwk, programming, and gaming. the former two take little resource, whereas the gaming probably would like to hog more performance. i play BF2 a lot and i find the loading particularly slow. hopefully after changing the cable i'll see a difference.

thanks again.
Click to expand...

depending on how old your hdd is you will more than likely see a pretty big difference when switching for bf2. hell, i would switch it right now, you must have patience 😕
 
2yrs old hdd = ~50MB/s str(assuming 7200rpm), but you are cutting it off with that cable at 33MB/s. so when you do change the cable you notice a nice free "upgrade" and your bf2 load times should go down 🙂
 
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