IDE disk problem

[Kostas Sfakiotakis]

Jeff Vian wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-04-13 at 01:24 +0300, Kostas Sfakiotakis wrote:
> 
>>Brian Gaynor wrote:
>>


>>>I have never personally seen problems with drives set to Cable Select on
>>>a modern machine. 

Could you please define the word modern in terms of technology and not 
years ?
What types of machines you consider modern ? i.e the 2 GHz+ ones ?


  Many high-volume manufacturers (Dell and Compaq are
>>>two I have personal experience with) have been shipping CS configured
>>>machines for 6 years or more.

Well being a home user entirely and not working with computers 
proffesionally
i think i only saw once a Compaq laptop otherwise i have never seen over
here a Dell/Compaq/IBM/HP machines so am tottaly unaware about what they
are doing and why the choose to do so .


>>If the drive marked as Cable Select or "CS" is together with a drive 
>>jumpered as Slave , then the IDE controller replaces the cable select with 
>>"Master" whereas
> 
> 
> Brian,
> This is counter intuitive, and not always true. It depends upon where on
> the CS cable the cs drive is attached.
> 
> 

Hmmm , Brian was responding to a post of mine actually .


Over here i have two machines . One is a Pentium 166 MMX machine and
the other one is an AMD Athlon XP 2700+ . Both were build by combining
parts not as a computer of this or the other brand .
   All i know is this . The 166 MMX CPU  machine is using non UDMA
cabling and most probably non Cable Select cables .There i have both
hard disks configured with the old style by defining Master and Slave .
   In the Athlon XP 2700+  i configured the drives as Master and Slave ( 
this one
has UDMA Cables , am unable to identify them as Cable Select ones or not 
) because
that was the working recipe i knew .
   Now i  know for  certain that my Western Digital Hard Disk was sent 
to me jumpered
as Cable Select . Now am tottaly unaware about the exact reason Western 
Digital
did that , am only certain that it did it .

IMO it would be preferable >not to use the Cable Select setting even
  when there is no ambiguity about what the drive realy is .


> Cable select is exactly what it says, and is VERY reliable in my
> experience.
> 
> -Use a cable select cable
> -plug the drive to be used as master to the connection designated as
> master.
> -plug the drive to be used as slave to the connection designated as
> slave.
> -jumper both drives as cable select (CS)


> With this config it does not matter if you have 2 drives or one, they
> will always be seen as master or slave depending upon where they are
> connected on the  cable.
> 
> Of course there are a few (VERY FEW) drives that will have problems, but
> I think they are all also very old, and new drives will not have any
> problems being (single/master/slave) on the cable.
> 
> Please note that most new drive cables are UDMA and cable select as
> well. I can't remember when I last saw a new IDE cable that was not
> UDMA.
> 
> I may also note that the only time I have ever had a problem with IDE
> drives on a cable select cable has been when the user (customers of
> mine) chose to jumper the drives as master/slave and they were using a
> cable select cable.

Of  course it happened as it was really supposed to happen . If  the
Master/Slave thing is defined by the Cable then it has to be that all the
way. Cable select cable and cable select on the drives .

Other than that  i have to thank Joel ( Posting of  13/04/2005 05:53 ,
possibly GMT+2 timing ) for the  very usefull information on Pin 28 .
I wasn't aware of such information . I bookmarked also the pcguide.com
site .


Kind Regards,
    Kostas