• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Really long IDE Cables

A

Arcygenical

Fully [H]
Joined
Jun 10, 2005
Messages
25,066
Now, I know that the "official" standard for IDE cable length is nothing over 18 inches long, but I'm wondering if anyone's had any actual problems with running longer cables... 24' or even 36'. I need to have a couple 36inch cables in my case so my bottom-most HD can reach the IDE connector on my mobo. Unfortunatly, my ASrock Dual sata 2's IDE headers are at the very *top* of my case, as the board's mounted in the BTX position.

So... Does anyone have any concrete (ie, not just the "general" consensus) evidence on whether using nice rounded (and shielded) 36' cables will degrade HD performance?

**EDIT** : w00t, Finally [H]lite :D
 
I had a set of rounded 36 inch IDE cables. My hard drives and RAID card were both rated for ata133, ultra DMA 6. I couldn't get that speed with the 36 inch cables. I'd get errors and the speed would bump back to ata100. Put a set of flat 24 inch IDE cables and was able to run at ata133 with no errors.
 
Can't say about using cables that long for hard drives, but I've used a 36" cable for a cdrw drive with no problem, and no slowing of max burning speed. :)

Have you considered using sata drives? Might be less likely to see a degradation of performance that way.
 
alphanumeric said:
I had a set of rounded 36 inch IDE cables. My hard drives and RAID card were both rated for ata133, ultra DMA 6. I couldn't get that speed with the 36 inch cables. I'd get errors and the speed would bump back to ata100. Put a set of flat 24 inch IDE cables and was able to run at ata133 with no errors.
Click to expand...
Agreed. In my experience it's best to limit HDD IDE cables to 24". Most quality longer length IDE cables
have the grounding wire extending from the shielding, which should be attached to the case. ~ example
 
Well, I really had no option, I already purchased 2 200gb IDE drives for an older DC++ server... I got the 36inch cables (they were 2.99 each on sale from a local computer shop that was going out of business) thinking I could always try something different if they didn't work. At first, I noticed some decreases in drive performance (average read burst speed of 80MBps, HD tach v3), but I cut away a bit of the clear insulation, and soldered on a grounding wire that I later attached to the steel chasis (A feature on the Cobra Cables, made by a company i can't remember the name of). I retested the drives and they both scored a burst speed closer to 108Mbps. Not too bad for some older drives. Anyways, thanks for the suggestions!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top