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If i am buying a new bare hard disk (oem), do I also need a new IDE cable?

H

Hammyton

Senior member
The one I am using is several years old and I am using it with an Ata33 hd, and the new HD will be ata100...
Any help would be appreciated, thanks
 
You will probably need one. Your IDE cable is likely a 40-conductor cable. ATA66 and higher needs an 80-conductor cable. You can probably find pictures of an 80 wire cable to compare to your current one. The wires are much finer.
 
Well im not sure how old my cable is... so let me ask you if its possible to use a 80conductor cable in a HD made for the 40conductor cables..... So I know that I dont already have one of these 80conducter cables 😛
 
well you can use a newer 80 pin cable for an old old drive... it's backwards compatible... but I'm pretty sure you don't have one...

a good way to tell is where the ide cable attaches to the mobo... is the plastic connector blue?

if it isn't it probably isn't an 80 pin ide cable...
 
The extra wires in an 80-conductor cable don't connect to separate pins on the connector. There's still only 40 pins. They are ground wires used to help prevent crosstalk when the frequency is up in the ranges used for ATA66 and ATA100. So the connectors still fit and can be used with any drive (and may even provide a slight data reliability boost if you're using an ATA33 drive with a very long cable).

The fact that you've got an ATA33 hard drive makes it most likely that you have a 40-wire cable. If the cable came with the hard drive (or the computer system) it would only be as good as the drive it came with, and if you bought the cable separately, you'd have noticed whether it said it was an ATA66 cable. There's a significant visual difference between the types, so if your cable looks the same as other IDE cables you've seen, it's probably not 80-wire. Compare it to your CDROM cable, which is almost assuredly only a 40-wire since no optical drive is ATA66-capable.
 
Check to see if your motherboard supports ATA66/100. If it does support at least ATA66, then you can get a new ATA66/100/133 IDE cable at some local computer shops. But I've ran into problems using ATA66/100/133 cables on some older motherboards that only does ATA33. So beware ahead of time.
 
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