24" IDE cable over 18"?

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Dark Assassin

Gawd
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Apr 10, 2003
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Is there any real difference between the length of an 18" IDE cable and a 24" cable? I'm sure there is more resistance for the signal to actually transfer along the path, but would it show a noticable difference in performance?

Personally, I'd just prefer a slightly longer cable in my case because it would cause less of a risk of getting unplugged from stretching to my top rack mounted drives.

Dark Assassin
 
Maxtor says not to use a cable longer than 18". I have a 24" round cable on my DVD & CD burner and they work fine.
 
The ATA-100 spec only allows up to 18" of cable length. Any 24" cable you find is considered out of spec, just so you know. I guess you could get away with it, though if I really cared about my data, I would be sure to back up the important stuff often.

Why 18"? The signalling scheme used in the ATA spec were only allow a safe propagation delay of 2.3 ns, and it so happens that it takes 2.3 nanoseconds to travel 18" down an approved IDE ribbon cable.

http://www.lostcircuits.com/advice/atafaq/6.shtml
 
I read the thread title and I am thinking:

Yes, 24" does tend to be over 18", but you never know. :p

Now, I have several very cheap rounded UV reactive 18" IDE cables, and I don't have any problems. I think that going much over 18" would not be a good idea, just like it's not a good idea to use more than 10 or 12 feet of USB cable at the most. You'll lose signal integrity and it will not do too well.
 
That's a good point. At worst, a CD-ROM drive's performance would suffer due to excessively needed error correction, but it wouldn't harm any data integrity like it could happen with a hard drive.
 
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