Dumb question about hard drives - be first to clue in the newbie!

[catseye]

Dumb question for you all:

Is there a difference in cabling between ide, ata/33, ata/66, and ata/100. I have an ata/100 drive on the way and wonder if it will plug directly into an older abit bh6 motherboard. Thanks.

 

[Aves]

I know that IDE/ATA33 uses a standard 40-Pin/40 Conductor Ribbon Cable, and ATA/66/100 uses a 40-Pin/80-Conductor Ribbon Cable. I believe that you can use either cable type, you just won't have ATA/66/100 with the 40/40. Which won't matter if your motherboard doesn't have support for ATA/66/100 anyway. Hope this helps.

 

[Yoshi]

It will work fine but will only be running at ATA33 because that is all that the 440BX chipset on your BH6 supports. If you want it to run at ATA100 you will have to buy a PCI adapter card that supports ATA100.

 

[Jeff H]

catseye, I have the same setup you're inquiring about, so here goes:

EIDE and ATA33 use a 40 wire / 40 pin cable. ATA66 and ATA100 use an 80 wire / 40 pin cable. You can use an ATA66/ATA100 cable on an ATA33 EIDE controller w/o issues.

Re your BH6, what BIOS version are you running? If it's an early version you may need to get ahold of your hard drive mfgr.'s ATA66/100 disable utility in order for your ATA33 onboard disk controller to properly recognize your hard drive. And, if the drive you're getting is greater than 30G, you may have trouble w/ your BIOS recognizing the drive.

So, my suggestion is you check what BIOS version you have, and if it isn't SS (for rev1.0x boards) or SP (for rev1.1), update it, then install your new hard drive.

 

[catseye]

Thanks to all. That whole 80/40 pin cable thing threw me.