welcome back to the adventure this is Adam and today we're going to be talking
about IDE cables don't click away just yet some of this information may be
useful I would like to take a look at this sound card that we have been using
in our system it has these pins for an IDE cable to connect to it but there
isn't a black plastic guard around it like you may see with some other cards
that is also true for the system that we've been using the motherboard doesn't
have the black plastic guards around the pins either this means that it is
possible to put the cable on in both directions
putting the cable on backwards shouldn't damage the drive connected to it but the
system won't be able to complete the power-on self-test if the power does
turn on the system won't boot you will either get beep codes or a blank black
screen so if the cable can go on both directions how do you know which way is
the right way on the sound card there is a mark in the upper right-hand corner
with a number 1 on it that indicates pin number 1 on the sound card on the IDE
cable there's this red strip on the side that's telling you what side should
connect to pin number 1 another iteration of IDE cable like this one I
have here has the spot over pin number 20 that's to prevent you from putting
the cable on the wrong direction the problem is that with our sound card all
40 pins are there so this cable actually won't work with the sound card
despite that limitation I love this IDE cable it was actually a donation by a
friend of the channel Chris thank you Chris I just love the way that it's
braided and somebody took a lot of time to put this together or it was done by a
machine very quickly either way I really like this cable it's unique and I only
have the two in my collection that Chris gave me although I'm sure these were
mass-produced
also looks very cool inside the case and makes cable management quite a bit
easier next we have a card like this that does have the black plastic guards
around the pins so the cable can only go on one direction pretty simple with the
cable there's this Ridge or bump right up here in the middle that just gets
lined up with this opening here on the card and it connects right in now this
is in ata 133 card it's a later revision of IDE than what the sound card is
capable of it has a much faster data transfer rate however you need an 80
conductor cable to take advantage of that if we take a look at this here is a
40 conductor IDE cable it's called that because there are 40 wires running
through it and here we have an example of an 80 conductor cable there are 80
wires running through it however there's still the same 40 pins available for IDE
the reason why there's twice as many wires in the cable is so communication
can go both directions at the same time that was a problem with the earlier
revisions of IDE or should say to get the faster transfer rate the bottleneck
became the IDE cable and there's a comparison of the two cables
side-by-side alright that concludes our look at IDE cables thanks for stopping
by see you next video