80 core vrs 40 core ide cable

[professor_jonny]

There has been a lot of people saying you get better throughput with an 80 core conductor cable which is some what correct as it will reduce cross talk between signal conductors but the difference will be stuff all.

the xbox ide cable is non standard compaired to a pc ide cable as the xbox hdd and dvd plugs are just paralell extention's of the mother board plug.

on the pc the cable select pin is only active on the master plug for example and specific pins are joined on the host to show an 80 core cable is installed etc...
because of this it is not known if it may cause issuies because of legacy signals and missing pins/signals etc with the xbox...

there is also the issue that the pc cables have the cdrrom futher away from the host than the xbox and it is hard to find on that will be the correct length because of this some mount the master socket in the motherboard and the host socked in the hdd but this cause cause problems with cable select and you might have to force your hdd to master also it is shorting the ata mode signal at the drive which may cause issuies who knows?.

if you want to make a proper xbox 80 core ide cable it would be best to butcher 3 80 core pc ide cables pinching the master device plugs off them and installing them on a new lenght of 80 core ribbon cable cable to ensure 100% compatibility as the master device does not have any keying pins or misising pins like the slave and host plugs.

The xbox does not switch to ata 166 if you put in a 80 core ide cable i measured the speed this my self with a scope as i have been trying to figure out why you cant boot an xbox with a sata hdd with no dvd board.

all in all if you put an 80 core ide cable in it may work it may not its your choice but dont expect it to go alot better

hope this clears things up a bit.

[cbagy]

The irony is, 80 pin round cables is all i've ever used.
Round in order not to block any air flow.
And shorter versions because they fit so neatly.
Probably modded 20 machines or more over the years and short, round, 80 pin is all i use.
Never had one fail yet !

Also heard others explaining that their SATA adapters for large SATA HDD conversions wouldn't boot without an 80 pin fitted.
So this isn't urban legend but real testing on the ground with real users machines, both SATA converted and standard HDD installs.

All horses for courses obviously.

[M•O•D]

The sata-pata-bridge-chip checks the cable for 80pin.
Totally normal.


Rgds.

[professor_jonny]

The sata-pata-bridge-chip checks the cable for 80pin.
Totally normal.


Rgds.

yes and there in lies one problem with 80 core ide cables when using sata adaptors. pin 34 or core 67 is grounded if using an 80 core conductor to show an 80 core cable is fitted, the xbox will be running ata66 forced by bios or chipset limitations who knows and the sata to ide adaptor will most likely select ata166 causing issuies with the sata adaptor firing data to quick to the xbox causing (epic fail) which has been my luck with 80 core ide cables and sata drives in the old box.

edit:

if you pull out pin 34 on the sata adaptor it will probally work fine but i have not tried it my self

[professor_jonny]

Also heard others explaining that their SATA adapters for large SATA HDD conversions wouldn't boot without an 80 pin fitted.
So this isn't urban legend but real testing on the ground with real users machines, both SATA converted and standard HDD installs.

All horses for courses obviously.

there is merit to this as the added grounding pins relieve cross talk problems and i guess some poor quality ide to sata converters might ignore the ata66 detect pin and may run at high speed helping the problem.

[M•O•D]

Hi!

if you pull out pin 34 on the sata adaptor it will probally work fine but i have not tried it my self

I found: Pin 34 is GPIO_DMA66_Detect.
The question is is this low or high active.

A try with cutting the line 34 should make no damage.



Rgds.

[professor_jonny]

Hi!

if you pull out pin 34 on the sata adaptor it will probally work fine but i have not tried it my self

I found: Pin 34 is GPIO_DMA66_Detect.
The question is is this low or high active.

A try with cutting the line 34 should make no damage.



Rgds.

ide is trystate logic so open circuit or tied to vcc shuld work and force connection speed to ata66 or lower for your ide to sata adaptor

cutting core 34 on the ide cable will not work as an 80 core ide cable as every even wire is ground and each signal pushes over to the next available odd numbered wire.
if you cut 34 on a 40 core ide cable it is unused in the pc world so most likely nothing will happen
so in an 80 core cable:
pin 1 is core 1
pin2 is core 3
pin 3 is core 5 etc.....