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IDE cable lenght limitation?

Red Squirrel

Red Squirrel

No Lifer
I rebuilt my server into a new case but ran into an issue, there is no way to physically connect the CD-ROM drive and the 3rd HDD on the same cable simply because they are too far apart. Is there any lenght limitations on IDE cables, or would I be ok to wire it up longer? This will be a big task so I want to make sure it will actually work. It will have to be about 2-3 feet long because of the nature of the case. 3 drives are in one location close together (far enough from IDE plugs on mobo) while the cdrom drive is far from both IDE plug and HDDs.
 
The ATA standard for IDE cables is 18-inches. However - that is years old, and many improvements have been made since then. I have used 30-in cables with no problem with PATA drives, and I have a 24-in SATA cable that works.

I would not be afraid to try a 30-in cable.
 
18 inches for UDMA cables, longer for PIO mode 3 and below. This is what is supposed to work, longer cables are in YMMV territory and very probably won't.

With UDMA transfers, you won't notice because transmissions are checksummed and retried ... until Windows sees a certain error rate and degrades the transfer mode.
 
Long cables have always been available but 18" remains the standard. You could always convert the drives to SATA and hook 'em to SATA controller - longer cables is one of the benefits of SATA.

.bh.
 
Hmm another thing, the board has a promise raid controller on it, is there a way to make that work for the cdrom drive? Or is this strictly for hard drives? Since if it works for cd-roms then I can just hook a 3rd regular lenght IDE cable to it. Since I"m not ready to spend money on a sata controller + replacing 3 300GB drives. I wish I would of put sata in that server in first place, but now is too late.
 
RAID arrays are for HDDs only but some SATA controllers can handle ATAPI drives - you just don't use the RAID function. All SATA II controllers are supposed to be ATAPI compatible but only a few of the SATA I controllers supported ATAPI: some Intel chipsets' integrated SATA and boards with SiliconImage SATA controller chip on them. Plextor has a compatibility list for their SATA burners - may be of some help. You can also get a cheap SiliconImage based PCI add-on controller. those support ATAPI.

.bh.
 
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