Hard drive cable question -

[Carroll Grigsby]

Gene Heskett wrote:


 >>> whack


> And someone else quoted the last two in reverse.  Can someone PLEASE go 
> get one of these friggin cables and settle the argument?  Good color 
> vision required of course :)

Gene:
I went through some Maxtor data sheets, and they say that blue goes to 
the motherboard, gray to the slave and black to the master. I noted that 
Maxtor refers to the cable as a "UDMA interface cable". My understanding 
is that the 80 wire cables came into existence to handle the higher data 
speeds required by the UDMA interface, and don't have anything to do 
with cable select. Maxtor also states that the supplied cable is to be 
used with either type of jumpering. Although Maxtor does not explictly 
state that the gray/slave black/master must observed when using 
master/slave jumpering, one of my hardware references [1] does say so.

It's left as an exercise for the reader to dissect a cable and settle 
the crossover/straight-through/termination questions. My eyes are too 
old for that kind of crap -- especially at this hour.

-- cmg

[1] "PC Hardware in a Nutshell" by R.B. Thompson and B.F. Thompson; 
O'Reilly, 3d ed; 2003.