IDE Cable

[Futyseq]

Hi, I need to use my old IDE drive tomorrow, but I can't find a cable for it.

 

So my question is: Is it necessary to connect all of the 40 pins on the drive and motherboard? Are some of them just optional? Or do I need to connect all of them?

 

PS.: I have no idea how IDE drives work so sorry for such a dumb question.

[WhitetailAni]

You will need a cable.

They are built to specific tolerances.

And yes, you will need all of them except the missing pin.

 

I have much experience with IDE.

[Eigenvektor]

Here you go: Parallel ATA

 

Look at "Pin out" on the right hand side, it tells you what each pin is used for.

[WhitetailAni]

Use a cable!

[mariushm]

All 40 pins (or 39) are needed.

 

You should use an IDE cable. You can probably manage to use 40 jumper wires (pre-terminated) IF you can configure the ide port to something lower like PIO2 ... PIO4 from bios or something like that instead of UDMA33 or higher - though you need a 80 pin cable for UDMA66/100/133.

PIO2 .. PIO4 is slow and cpu intensive, the speeds will be somewhere around 10-20 megabytes/s