How much of a visual improvement in a system can you see with better IDE / Floppy ribbon cables installed? 80-wire over 40-wire? Are there certain brands that are better?
Is the improvement better or worse with faster systems or the same?
How do you know if you have 33, 66, 100 and 133 MB/s cables?
Always been curious of this but never asked...
If I'm not mistaken:
80-pin cables are needed to support UDMA. Period. There is no magical speed increase if your drives, IDE controller, and operating system do not already support UDMA. There is certainly no "visual improvement", whatever that means.
All 80-pin cables should support all UDMA modes, but of course not all drives and IDE controllers support all UDMA modes.
I cannot imagine one brand being superior to another (unless you like round cables over flat ones).
When ATA-66 drives came out, that's when 80 conductor cables came out. But this was only to support the *interface* bandwidth increase from 33 to 66 MB/sec. The drives themselves still did not come close to those speeds for years.
So like Jorpho said, no noticeable improvement.
If you know your hdd is capable of sustained transfer rates of 60+ MB/sec, then you want to use an 80 conductor cable to make sure you're not bottlenecking it.
edit: I meant 30+ MB/sec, not 60+ in the previous sentence. 😊
The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know.
OPL3 FM vs. Roland MT-32 vs. General MIDI DOS Game Comparison
Let's benchmark our systems with cache disabled
DOS PCI Graphics Card Benchmarks
I know what you mean. The ASUS P2B had a built-in UltraDMA/33 interface and I'm only getting a benchmarked ~25MB/s read speeds from a 40GB Western Digital HDD pulled from an old Pentium 4-based Windows XP system (that was going to be trashed by my old boss). For my 80GB WD HDD in my original Windows XP system, I just benched it at ~45MB/s read speeds and the Abit KX7-333 board has UDMA133, so...yeah. HDDs can't keep up with the drives. Both systems are using 80-wire IDE cables for the HDDs. The WinXP system is using another 80-wire IDE cable for the DVD-R drive. The Win98 system is using a 40-wire cable for the CD-R drive, since I don't need the massive increase in bandwidth for watching DVD movies.
Thanks for the information.
When modding my xbox its well documented that 80pin cables work better then 40pin when using SATA to IDE adaptors.
I thought yeh right and just left the original 40 pin in and got a HDD error, swapping it for a 80 pin and it worked fine right away.
Slightly off topic but proof it does make a difference, if only marginally.
