Quote:
Originally posted by Wa11y
Bear in mind, these are telephone system engineers, not computer engineers. My engineers don't work with ribbon cable.
Since all the evidence points to me being wrong, I may have to accept that. AidanII makes some good points as well.
Honestly, at this point, I'm kinda befuddled, but leaning towards the grounding thing. |
The grounding is very important. If they were left unconnected they would not be as effective.
The fact that it is ribbon cable and the fact that the order matters make it very different from the usual telephone cabling, where the multicore is arranged in twisted pair fashion with relatively little attention paid to the ordering.
My suspicion is that it's a little overkill just to keep system manufacturers out of trouble when they get too close to the limits with El cheapo cable. Not having anything over ATA33 (and not using IDE!) makes it difficult to test what would happen if you got a 40pin cable operating at ATA100.
AidanII