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-wire/40-pin cables offer improved data reliability and signal integrity by adding 40 more ground wires than standard 40-wire/40-pin IDE cables. The extra 40 strands in an 80-wire cable act as insulators between the 40 signaling strands to prevent and reduce crosstalk.



• Using an 80-wire cable allows for the use of ATA/66 and ATA/100 modes with drives and systems that support these rates. If you have an ATA/100 or ATA/66 drive without the 80-wire cable, the drive will only run at 33MB/sec.



• You can use an ATA/33 drive on the same cable as an ATA/100 drive, and with a current controller that provides independent device timing, it will not affect the operation of an ATA/66 or ATA/100 drive. This is not possible with a standard 40-wire IDE cable.

 

80 Conductor IDE/ATA Cable

3 plugs on each cable

Use this type cable on DVD Burners

 

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