80 and 40 pin cables

[macrymble]

my motherboard came with both a 40 and 80 pin cables. which one shoud i use for my dvd-rom/cdrw and which should i use for my hard drive. i'm assuming i should use the 80 pin for the hard drive, but i want to make sure

[Confused]

I believe they are both 40 pin. One is 80 wire and other is 40 wire. 80 wire cables are for ATA 66/100/133 devices such as HD's. Use 80 wire with blue connector to mobo, black connector to HD that will be master and set drive to cable select "CS". If you add another drive later on it would go on grey connector and also be set to "CS".

40 wire cable will be for optical drives as they are still ATA33 devices. They will be set as Master or Slave.
Chas

[macrymble]

ooops...yeah, that's what i meant..

[mike breck]

What Confused has said is right. Although a lot of people are using the 80 wire cables on optical drives as well. It doesn't do any harm and the 40 extra ground wires cause less interference during data transfer.

[macrymble]

so i don't do master/slave for the 80 pin?

[glc]

Correct - 80 wire cables are cable select cables.