Ultra DMA (80-Conductor) IDE/ATA Cable There are a lot of issues and problems associated with the original 40-conductor IDE cable, due to its very old and not very robust design. Unterminated flat ribbon cables have never been all that great in terms of signal quality and dealing with reflections from the end of the cable. The warts of the old design were tolerable while signaling speeds on the IDE/ATA interface were relatively low, but as the speed of the interface continued to increase, the limitations of the cable were finally too great to be ignored. In the ATA/ATAPI-4 standard that introduced the Ultra DMA transfer mode set, a new cable was introduced to replace the old standby: the 80-conductor IDE/ATA cable. The name is important: the new cable has 80 conductors (wires)--it does not have 80 pins on each connector, though, just 40. This means that the new cable is pin-compatible with the old drive. No change has been made to the IDE/ATA connectors, aside from the color-coding issue (see below). The obvious question, of course, is this: what's the point of adding 40 extra wires to a cable if they aren't connected to anything? Well for starters, the 40 wires are connected to something, just not their own pins on the interface connectors. The extra 40 wires don't carry new information, they are just used to separate the "real" 40 signal wires, to reduce interference and other signaling problems associated with higher-speed transfers. So the 40 extra conductors are connected to ground, interspersed between the original 40 conductors of the old cable. Any stray signals that would "cross-talk" between adjacent wires on the 40-conductor cable are "absorbed" by these extra ground wires, improving signal integrity. The extra ground wires can be either all of the even-numbered wires, or all of the odd-numbered wires in the cable.
80 Conductor IDE/ATA Cable 3 connectors on each cable - blue, gray and black The blue end connects to the motherboard, black to Hard Drive CD or DVDRom and gray to slave device 18 inches long total length
Blue is 12 inches from the Grey Gray connector is 6 inches from the end with a black connector Use this type cable on IDE type DVD Burners New Free Shipping in USA
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