Strange things with my hard drive

[Kerry Hoath]

The 80-wire cable is springy whereas
a normal 40 wire cable will flopy when bent.
40 wire cables have wires that you can easily feel the separation between
whereas 80-wire cables have the wires a lot closer together.
80-wire cables usually have a pull tab on each connector i.e. a piece of plastic you grab and pull
to disconnect the cable froma drive.
80-wire cables provide more shielding to the ide signal so that it is not currupted 
at udma/66 speeds and higher. Most system boards now ship with uata/100 controllers
and unless specifically slowed down they power up in the fastest mode supported by drive
and controler. Without an 80-wire udma/66
cable data corruption can and does occurr.

One of the weakest parts of the ata spec was the cable; you don't have the
redundant grounds for each signal like scsi does.

Regards, Kerry.
On Mon, Feb 25, 2002 at 01:08:09AM +0100, Victor Tsaran wrote:
> Hi, Kerry!
> I used the cable which came with my motherboard. I am not sure if this is an
> 80-wire or not. Would this matter? How would I identify the difference
> otherwise?
> Thanks,
> Victor
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Kerry Hoath" <kerry at gotss.net>
> To: <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
> Sent: Sunday, February 24, 2002 10:30 PM
> Subject: Re: Strange things with my hard drive
> 
> 
> > Did you make sure that the cable to the hard drive was an 80-wire
> > udma-66 cable? Compared to the cdrom cable the wires are finer.
> > UDMA-66 cables are also more springy and less flexible than standard ones.
> > Even modern burners run at a maximum of udma/33 which doesn't require
> special cables.
> > Hard drives on the other hand can run at udma/66 or uata/100 and
> > failure to use an 80-wire cable with a stupid o/s which fails to disable
> udma
> > can and usually does result in data corruption. The operating system in q
> > question comes from Redmond :-)
> > Linux shuts down dma if it sees 3 crc errors.
> > Win 2k and XP are supposed to do this too but sometimes
> > it doesn't happen.
> >
> > Regards, Kerry.
> > On Sun, Feb 24, 2002 at 12:56:37PM -0500, Igor Gueths wrote:
> > > Hi. You might want to slave the Cdrom to the hard drive. I haven't
> actually built a machine as of yet, but hope this helps.
> > > ----- Original Message -----
> > > From: Victor Tsaran <tsar at sylaba.poznan.pl>
> > > To: Speakup List <speakup at braille.uwo.ca>
> > > Sent: Sunday, February 24, 2002 7:26 PM
> > > Subject: Strange things with my hard drive
> > >
> > >
> > > > Hell, listers!
> > > > I know some of you, especially Kerry, are big hardware specialists.
> Hope you
> > > > will be able to advise something for me this time as well.
> > > > I am putting together a new machine. Whenever I connect the hard drive
> to
> > > > the IDE0 and CDROM to IDE1, both on master, I get "hard disk
> failed...", but
> > > > CDROM is found. However, if I connect hard drive to IDE1 and CDROM to
> IDE0,
> > > > both to master, then both are recognized fine. Why is this hapenning?
> I
> > > > tried these combinations several times, and the same result comes out.
> > > > Can you suggest something?
> > > > Victor
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > _______________________________________________
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> >
> > --
> > Kerry Hoath:  kerry at gotss.net kerry at gotss.eu.org or
> kerry at gotss.spice.net.au
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> >
> >
> 
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Kerry Hoath:  kerry at gotss.net kerry at gotss.eu.org or  kerry at gotss.spice.net.au