Try this Kenwood site out. It's mostly Japanese but I see some model numbers. I believe you want the top file.
http://www.kenwood.co.jp/j/products/component/download2.html

Thanks swaaye. I tried the .com and others, interesting the .jp always keep the files up though!

I got the files. but found out the seller sent me a UCR004010 model which is 40x. His listing is for a UCR-402 (42x) model. I just contacted the seller, hopefully it was just a mistake. I won't flash until I get an answer though.

Reading some reviews show that the 42x and up are more reliable drives.

what OS are you using?

Windows 98 SE

Rest of system is:
Pentium 3-S 1400MHz
384MB PC133 SDRAM
ASUS TUSL2-C
3DFX Voodoo 3 1000 AGP
D-Link 10/100 NIC
Seagate 40GB hard disk

No soundcard currently. Just a test system.

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

Reading some reviews show that the 42x and up are more reliable drives.

Well I've had the chance to try the 42, 52 and 72x editions. I have one in my collection-o-retro (72x maybe?) Their problem isn't reliability/longevity so much as it is the inability to read CDR/RW well. But if you stick to pressed CDs they are usually very fast across the entire disc and relatively quiet.

But between their compatibility issues and their high cost they didn't really have a chance against the $20 40k RPM disc exploders.

swaaye wrote:

RogueTrip2012 wrote:

Reading some reviews show that the 42x and up are more reliable drives.

Well I've had the chance to try the 42, 52 and 72x editions. I have one in my collection-o-retro (72x maybe?) Their problem isn't reliability/longevity so much as it is the inability to read CDR/RW well. But if you stick to pressed CDs they are usually very fast across the entire disc and relatively quiet.

But between their compatibility issues and their high cost they didn't really have a chance against the $20 40k RPM disc exploders.

My 72x died in less than 2 years. It cost almost as much as a burner too.

They had longevity issues, or I had a bad one. I didn't want to find out though.

Well they all seem defective once you try a CDR. 😉

I've always wanted to try the Kenwood 72x, but if it can't read CDR's then it's kinda useless to me anyway 🙁

It will usually read them but it will struggle and not read anywhere near its rated speed.

These drives will blow your mind when you install a large app off of a pressed disc though. It's like installing off of a hard drive. The problem is that I usually do install from a hard drive because I use disc images these days 🤣. And I install 98SE from the HDD (I copy the Win98 folder to the C drive).

Also, I suggest always using 80 pin cables. Throw the 40s away. If the 80's keyed with a plugged hole, unplug it with something. I've seen first hand improved functionality of even DMA33 and slower drives. 80 pin cables provide a cleaner signal.

swaaye wrote:

It will usually read them but it will struggle and not read anywhere near its rated speed.

These drives will blow your mind when you install a large app off of a pressed disc though. It's like installing off of a hard drive. The problem is that I usually do install from a hard drive because I use disc images these days 🤣. And I install 98SE from the HDD (I copy the Win98 folder to the C drive).

Also, I suggest always using 80 pin cables. Throw the 40s away. If the 80's keyed with a plugged hole, unplug it with something. I've seen first hand improved functionality of even DMA33 and slower drives. 80 pin cables provide a cleaner signal.

Just go all rounded cables and be done with it. The only ribbon cable I have anymore is my SLI cable for my V2, as rounding it would make a mess at a length of less than 9 inches (at least that's my estimate for how long a cable needs to be for the rounded cable to make sense). Not to mention making one would be a bear as I'd have to trace the wires of a factory produced rounded cable (cutting them yourself never looks as good).

And it was pretty awesome back in the day. As you said, installs from pressed discs were blazing fast. It took like half as long to install a game. I wish they had found a way to make it work with burned discs, and if they ever made a burner that way, it would be worth the extra price hit. I'd gladly spend 200 bucks for a DVD burner that could burn at say 40x.

I've had problems with rounded cables. PATA cables are ribbons because there can be crosstalk if the wires get too close to each other. The 80 pin cable interleaves grounds in with the wires to reduce crosstalk even more (it's like 2 dimensional shielding).

That said I don't know if there are some fancier rounded cables that are designed for better signal quality. Twisted pairs or shielding inside maybe?

the rounded cables are designed to save space, nothing more
they came out around 10 years ago... long after all cables went to 80 conductor, thus all rounded IDE cables are 80 conductor

no such thing as "80 pin" cables btw

Yes I've followed rounded cables since the beginning too. Like I said since they aren't a ribbon anymore the 40 ground wires may not be doing their job as intended. They are great to work with but data corruption isn't worth it.

I have a rounded floppy cable that I do use however. I had a DFI NF4 board that came with rounded cables and I kept that one.

Want to save space? Grab a SATA PCI card and go that route. I'm really itching to get a SSD for my retro nonsense 🤣

I was using a 80-wire ATA100 non-rounded cable, then tried the 40-wire cable non-rounded, results the same either way.

I'd like to note some 80-wire cables the blocked hole in the middle is sometimes molded that way. This makes it harder to install on older ATA33 mobos like my ABIT BE6-II where all pins on the mobo are present. So it is nice to have a few extra 40-wire cables about.

🤣 swaaye. I've wanted to play around with some SSD's on my retro build as well. I bought 2 SATA 150 PCI cards even. Hard to find cheap 16-30GB drives though. Looking at the specs though many SSD's will be rather limited to the PCI 133MB/s theoretical limit. Then you gotta make sure the drive does random file array placement so you don't burn cells out too quickly.

I run 2 64GB G. Skill SSD's in Raid 0 in my main machine. It still doesn't max out windows 7's WMI score. I think it gets like 7.2 (lowest score of the system). Boot times suck still with this setup. Probably windows 7 though. The G.Skills do not have Trim, also use the older Jmicron controllers which some said stuttered that I've never experienced since I built the system in 2009.

Been trying to keep a lookout for cheap VelociRaptors in the 150GB range for a retro rig. Seen some sold as cheap as $50!!!

EDIT: Still waiting on a response from the seller if he just sent me the wrong drive 🙁

I think the Sandforce drives should be safe to use. They are pretty smart. But expensive. It's the silence and instant access times that I'm mostly after.

Btw you can punch a hole in those plugged 80 wire cables. They work fine once you can plug them in.

I never had data corruption issues with the 80 conductor round cables
I have a few conventional 80 conductor ribbon cables to fall back to if I wanted though 😀

one of the criterias in the newer ATA standards is "cable select"... this meant that the connectors must be keyed in order for this to work... the cable must be plugged in the same fashion you would with a A and B floppy setup that way the master/slave drives can be detected properly

this is why all 80 conductor cables are keyed
but what's also important is so the grounding from those extra 40 wires work properly... with a plain jane 40 pin 40 wire cable, it really didn't matter which way you plugged it in as long as you matched pin 1 on the controller end with the drive end... with ultra dma, the grounding is assigned to specific pins to do the noise cancellation... plug it in backwards and it wouldn't work right

I'm not sure about how much it does, but I've always bought the fancier rounded cables. The one's I buy have either a copper or an aluminum braid around all of the conductors, which I guess in theory might work as a shield, although since the shileld isn't grounded on either end of the connection (at least I don't think it is), it's really just a big antenna 😀.

I've never had data corruption though even with a 36 inch long rounded IDE cable. I did blow out a SB Live and a Live Drive once though when I liberated a rounded IDE cable and tried to use it in place of the ribbon that came with the live drive. This was over a decade ago and I was still a teenager. I didn't think to check pinouts first...

TheMAN wrote:

this is why all 80 conductor cables are keyed

80 wire cables often have two keys. There's the notch on the plug and there's also a blocked pin. The blocked pin often makes it impossible to plug them into sockets of UDMA33 and older ports. I have punched a hole in these and found them to work fine on old boards.