Cable Select?

[wide angle]

Hi Guys!

Good day to everyone.

Could someone explain to me the purpose of CABLE Select on the
HD or CR-ROM. As I know only Master and Slave.

thanks for your informative input

Regards, Henry

[ktkendall]

It is used now on the newer ide's with the 80 conductor cables. The device knows wether it is master or slave by it's position on the ide cable, thus the name cable select!

[mike breck]

Hi Henry,

The use of Cable Select is for mobos that support ATA 66 or ATA 100 Hard drives on the IDE channels. It will allow such HDs to run at full performance.

So to use CS you must have a mobo and HDs that support ATA 66/100.

To use Cable Select, you must also use an 80 wire/40 pin ribbon (the standard ATA 33 cable has only 40 wires but still has 40 pins)cable that usually has a blue, gray, and black connector.

The blue goes to the mobo, the black to the Master HD, and the gray is for a Slave HD.

There advantage of using this type of cable is that you do not have to jumper two HDs as Master and Slave. You just jumper both to Cable Select and then their POSITION ON THE CABLE determines which is Master and Slave.

For example, if you have two HDs, one of which has the OS and the other is just used for data; then with both drives jumpered to CS, you would connect the drive with the OS (the Primary Master) to the BLACK connector and the drive with the data (Primary Slave) on the GRAY connector.

This alleviates potential jumpering mistakes.

The extra 40 wires (80 instead of 40) helps to reduce "noise" on the cable which reduces interference when reading and writing to the HD.

Cable Select and the ATA 66/100 cable is ideal for HDs but can cause difficulties when used with optical devices like CD-Roms or CD-RW drives.

That's why it's better to use a standard 40 wire/40 pin cable with these devices and jumper them in the old Master/Slave way.

Therefore, if you have two HDs and two optical devices, you could put the HDs on IDE1 using an ATA 66/100 cable (jumpered as CS)and the optical devices on IDE2 using a standard ATA 33 cable (jumpered as Master/Slave).

HTH

[wide angle]

Thanks a lot for the very informative replies that I got from you guys. I really appreciate.

Have a good day and take care

Henry