Master , Slave , Cable select ?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Gray
  • Start date Start date
G

Gray

Not the most important questions here lol !
While putting my new system together a few nights ago, a friend was by and
told me , I was hooking things up
wrong ? He said on the new motherboards I should set the hard drives up as
Cable select ? And
let the motherboard and cable position set the drive designation ? I've
always set the jumpers as
master and slave and had no problems ? Also on this P4C800 deluxe it has the
extra ATA connector ,
he said to stay away from it unless I wanted to hookup my spare 40gig drive
?

I got a bad power supply and had to send it back so thought I'd ask these
questions while I wait for it to come
back. Thanks in advance for any insight on these questions!
 
Gray said:
Not the most important questions here lol !
While putting my new system together a few nights ago, a friend was by and
told me , I was hooking things up
wrong ? He said on the new motherboards I should set the hard drives up as
Cable select ? And
let the motherboard and cable position set the drive designation ? I've
always set the jumpers as
master and slave and had no problems ? Also on this P4C800 deluxe it has the
extra ATA connector ,
he said to stay away from it unless I wanted to hookup my spare 40gig drive
?

I got a bad power supply and had to send it back so thought I'd ask these
questions while I wait for it to come
back. Thanks in advance for any insight on these questions!
Click to expand...

If you use cable select make sure to use 80
conductor / 40 pin IDE cables or will not
work. But I don't know if it makes any difference
or not. But most new hard drives come jumpered
as cable select.
The spare IDE port is for RAID along with two
of the SATA ports.

Jim M
 
Gray said:
Not the most important questions here lol !
While putting my new system together a few nights ago, a friend was by and
told me , I was hooking things up
wrong ? He said on the new motherboards I should set the hard drives up as
Cable select ? And
let the motherboard and cable position set the drive designation ? I've
always set the jumpers as
master and slave and had no problems ? Also on this P4C800 deluxe it has the
extra ATA connector ,
he said to stay away from it unless I wanted to hookup my spare 40gig drive
?

I got a bad power supply and had to send it back so thought I'd ask these
questions while I wait for it to come
back. Thanks in advance for any insight on these questions!
Click to expand...

Cable-select was sometimes a problem with older hardware. It is handy to use
and if you encounter problems then just revert to the Master-Slave method.
billh
 
I use both approaches, neither is better than the other, and sometimes
due to cable dressing needs, and HD mounting locations, CS doesn't
work so well.

--
Best regards,
Kyle
| Not the most important questions here lol !
| While putting my new system together a few nights ago, a friend was
by and
| told me , I was hooking things up
| wrong ? He said on the new motherboards I should set the hard drives
up as
| Cable select ? And
| let the motherboard and cable position set the drive designation ?
I've
| always set the jumpers as
| master and slave and had no problems ? Also on this P4C800 deluxe it
has the
| extra ATA connector ,
| he said to stay away from it unless I wanted to hookup my spare
40gig drive
| ?
|
| I got a bad power supply and had to send it back so thought I'd ask
these
| questions while I wait for it to come
| back. Thanks in advance for any insight on these questions!
|
|
 
With new hardware you should be using 80 conductor
cable everywhere (even for the optical drives),
otherwise you will be limited to ATA33 speeds. Also
you should put the master device at the end of the
cable, and the slave device on the middle connector.

Assuming you follow both of the above rules, cable
select is more convenient as you can add/move/remove
devices and not have to change jumpers. I even use
cable select on my optical drives and that has worked
fine.

Manufacturers were planning to phase out master/slave
in place of cable select, but SATA has beat them to it.

P.S. It is even a good idea to use 80 conductor cables
if you are rebuilding old computers for things like
cable modem routers. These cables have less cross talk
and better signal characteristics. You will end up with
a greater safety margin for the disk subsystem.
 
Thanks for all the info!
I checked and have plenty of the 80-conductor cables (got two sets for some
reason)

Later this summer I want to change over to SATA drives, can I just install
them and copy the data
over from my old drives? or will I have to do another fresh windows install?
Or would I be better off just leaving the system run off the IDE drives?
(Trying to get as much speed for Photoshop, wave editing, Disk burning as I
can)
I've had real bad luck with OC'ing so, I'd realy like to keep the system as
close to stock as
possible. The price of CPU's and memory and stuff makes for a hard lesson
LOL!

Anyway thanks again for all the answers : )
 
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