Do It Yourself IDE cables?

[Wa11y]

Anyone know where I can get Do It Myself IDE cable setups? A crimper, the connectors, and the ribbon cable? I have a huge case (2 feet tall) with some funky drive configurations.

[Random Nonsense]

i been wondering the same myself! i seem to remember seing a place u could buy them, i think in maplin, ill take a look after new year for u m8, if they got em, post me the money, ill post u the stuff.

might take a while if you live in USA tho

[kplonk]

would also like to know if you find one

[Aedan]

You can buy 40way ribbon cable pretty easily. I'm not so sure abou the 80way stuff. Anywhere that sells ribbon cable should also sell the IDC connectors you want. As to a crimper, you can either buy a proper crimping tool, or use a halfway decent vice to push the connector onto the cable. I can't help locate anywhere that sells them in the US, as I'm European based.

You should be able to do a search for them though.

AidanII

[Aphex]

Aye, for UK peeps its maplin.co.uk

[Aedan]

To be honest with you,I tend to find places like Farnell are much more likely to have the bits I want. Maplin do less and less useful parts, and more and more stuff I can get down the highstreet...

AidanII

[Wa11y]

Originally posted by kplonk
would also like to know if you find one

Thus far, haven't been able to find jack crap.

Directron has some 36" IDE cables. I ordered a pair of the 80-wire cables, but got 40-wire instead. So I'm working on getting them replaced. I'll probably try to remove the mobo connector, and slide it up just a bit farther, since I don't need two feet between the mobo and first device, but I do need about a foot between the middle and end connector.

[Ridenow]

I told you about jameco.com earlier.
Hosfelt has the connectors, but I do not see the ribbon cable.
http://www.hosfelt.com/s-cart/form.p...=77&exPageNO=9

[Aedan]

If you want to make your own ATA66/100 cables, then you'll need to find the correct connectors 40pin, 80way connectors. Circuit Assembly do their ATAS range of connectors - information/distributors can be found athttp://www.ca-online.com/ATASCenter/ATASProducts.asp.

Also, ATA/UDMA66 and ATA/UDMA100 are designed to operate over an 18" cable maximum due to clock skew. I would not recommend going over this length and trying to use UDMA66 or UDMA100.

AidanII

[Wa11y]

Originally posted by AidanII
Also, ATA/UDMA66 and ATA/UDMA100 are designed to operate over an 18" cable maximum due to clock skew. I would not recommend going over this length and trying to use UDMA66 or UDMA100.

So, what, you're telling an overclocker not to take things out of spec?

Yeah, I know about the distance limitations. But when your case is 24" tall and you're connecting the drives to a PCI controller card, suddenly 18" seems rather inadequate. But 36" is somewhat excessive, hence I'm hoping to move the mobo connector up to shorten them, if I can.

[Aedan]

Originally posted by Wa11y
So, what, you're telling an overclocker not to take things out of spec?

There's taking things out of spec, and there's taking things out of spec. Alas, the cable limits are not like the clock limits on CPUs. Cables don't vary as much as processors do in their tolerances. Of course, if you really want a challenge, try going over USB's 5m limit.

If you're not running UDMA/66 or UDMA/100 you might be able to get away with longer cables.

AidanII

[Wa11y]

I'm running ATA/100 on my drives. And it's only a few drives that I'll be running it on, and none of them are system or critical drives, so I'm not worried. I'm running a 19" IDE cable on my system drive and my superdisk floppy drive. Kinda had to. I have this hoss to work with. And since the only external 3.5" bay is clear up on top, that's what I got stuck with. I could swear that Antec had a KS-180 case that had the 3.5" drive bay below the 5.25" bays, but I can't find it anywhere. So I'm kinda buggered unless I change my case. Which I just may do.

[Temfate]

Let me know if you get ATA/100 to work at that lenght; I have the same case and have a 36" cable bought from Micro Center that says ata66 compatible; but I'm letting Windows 2000 auto-config it at the moment...