rounded cables for ATA33 ?

[coville]

I've found a few sites that say their rounded ATA cables will work at ATA33 if you plug one hole. Problem is they don't explain how. I want an ATA33 rounded cable for my DVD Burner. Has anyone done this?

 

[Zepper]

Any drive that is UATA/UDMA should work fine on any 80-wire cable, round or flat. Riddle me this... If you have to plug a hole to make it work, that would have to assume that there is no pin on the drive that uses that hole, else you couldn't plug it in with the hole plugged. If there is no pin, then why do you have to plug the hole? So that story can be dismissed as BS!
. I've used only 80-wire flat cables for a long time - even with non-UDMA drives with no problemo, since I read somewhere that some mobo IDE adapters were more stable with matched cables (80 and 80). So just set all your drives to CS (Cable Select) and fly (middle connector will be Slave on channel, end connector will be Master on channel, blue connector goes to mobo). My new MSI X48 Combo drive has a UDMA-2 (33MHz) interface and it works fine on the round cable I get from SVC.
.bh.

 

[tracerbullet]

Agreed.

I've had rounded cables to all my components for years now, never a single issue. They are "backwards compatable" this way.

 

[coville]

Thanks! Not that it was a big expense compared to the whole system but I wanted to be sure I was ordering the right thing.

 

[tracerbullet]

After you get them, and they work (they will), the next time you visit the places that said they wouldn't... be skeptical of anything else you read there. (Hopefully it wasn't here at AT that you saw this dubious info). 😉

 

[BTSpope]

speaking of rounded cables, check out cpu mag this month. They did an interview with the head of technologies at voodoo pc's and he had some pretty strong opinions about data transfer errors and rounded cables. Im not sure if i fully agree with him, but it makes for an interesting read

 

[bootoo]

I'm going to check that out. When folks were first rounding their cables that issue came up again and again but then it just disappeared but it always bothered me. (Not enough though, I love rounded cables). Maybe I'll have to think twice... EEEW though, those flat cables are so ugly and bulky.