custom ide cable's

[professor_jonny]

I just come across this has any one tried a service like this ?

http://www.cpustuff.com/custom-ultra-at ... cable.html

or this:

http://www.stonewallcable.com/dept.asp?dept_id=122

[Geeba]

I tend to just rumage through the bargain bin at Maplins - they usually have 133 cables in there

But a proper cable in the right order would be nice.

[professor_jonny]

Off the shelf pc cables are not wired the same as Xbox ones, but I don't think it really makes a difference but in theory it does if the Xbox conforms to the standard. I thought about getting them made with the same wiring as the original Xbox Ide cable with 80 core conductors and see if there is any difference.

I'm sort of wondering if the wiring is the cause of why some Pata/ Sata adaptors wont work with the Xbox without 80 conductor IDE cables or if it is the extra shielding that makes them work.

[xman]

I've never had a drama with using the stock Xbox cables myself. I still have 3 of the original DealsXtreme version 3.0 and 3.1 boards I linked to a couple of years ago. I bought heaps of them and consequently sold a heap of 1 and 2TB sata machines using them. I sort of wished I never put a link to them because they are long gone now although I'm sure there are heaps of members here using those adapters I had such great success with.

[professor_jonny]

I guess xman it depends on the converter and to some extent the xbox console.

with the converter I use if you don't have an 80 core conductor on some setups it wont boot on others it will.

it would be nice to figure out why this happens and see if there is a way we can make all adaptors compatable.

on all harddisks they have an ttl interface for console commands and you can read the log off the interface to see if there is any short transactions or errors it will tell you over the putty connection to the hardsisk.

I did connect it up and pulled a log but the st2000dm001 I had for a play thing has a cut down log and did not have enough info do diag why.

[xman]

I think the pinout remains the same but I think the difference is the common grounds. That was the difference I noticed. Mine have a lot of pins bussed up together on each end of the pin connector. Others I have seen seem to use separate circuits a lot more. I figured that could explain why some work perfectly on the standard cable while others must use the 80 wire cable. This is all what I eyeballed, I never did any probing to prove it.

[Geeba]

Off the shelf pc cables are not wired the same as Xbox ones, but I don't think it really makes a difference but in theory it does if the Xbox conforms to the standard. I thought about getting them made with the same wiring as the original Xbox Ide cable with 80 core conductors and see if there is any difference.

I'm sort of wondering if the wiring is the cause of why some Pata/ Sata adaptors wont work with the Xbox without 80 conductor IDE cables or if it is the extra shielding that makes them work.

Hmmmm they are.... thats why you have to twist them to make them work... the xbox ones are just pressed on the other way round and upside down.... I used to buy rolls of flat ribbon cable and IDE blocks and press my own on... they self cut when pressed in a vice, you just have to make sure they are square.

The later IDE adapters are usually Ultra/100/133 so will only work with 80 strand cable. From memory anything UDMA66 and upwards will need 80 strand.

All the testing I saw/read and indeed my own experince the xbox was definitely faster with 80 strand, but my days with stopwatch booting xbox games are long gone.

[professor_jonny]

The grounding of #PDIAG on pin34 on the master socket detects the presence of an 80 core conductor and sets the strobe clock accordingly if all is running to standard the pata/sata adaptor should know not to use ata 66 or above with the wrong cable.

The strobe signal carries the clock generated form the thing sending data and it will select the clock speed accordingly that's why you can have a slow cd rom and fast hdd on the same bus and one not effect the speed of the other.

The cable in theory should not effect the adaptor working or not but it does.

[Geeba]

Unknown specification chipset on the xbox which was rumoured to be ATA66, shipped with ATA33 cable then people adding cheap Chinese SATA/IDE adapters again of unknow specification... always gonna be ugly....

[xman]

All I ever found was the adapters I use work best with Seagate 1 and 2Tb HDDs. They wouldn't work with Hitachi or WD HDDs unless those makes HDDs were under 700Gb then they worked perfectly just like the Seagate 1 and 2Tb do. I had access to many sata HDDs to do my testing but to me the interest was in 1 and 2TBs. I didn't see value in doing 500 or 700Gb satas when the cost of the 1 and 2TBs was virtually the same. I always suspected the bootup time of the sata to be the issue myself but I'm open to being educated. I suspected the WD and Hitachi HDDs over 700 Gb to simply take to long for the Xboxes setup time other wise I believed those brand 1 and 2Tbs to have worked.

[professor_jonny]

I have all ways used WD drives but I would like to use Hitachi but they have never worked reliably.
Seagate drives have had horrible reliability data since the flooding in a few years back and Hitachi are among the best in reliability.

As all modern disks have a minimal bios on the pcb and the main part stored on the partition, their is delay before the drive is fully up after power on but I don't think that is the sole reason for all setups not working.