40 Pin 80 Wire Ribbon reccomendations?

whats the specs for the 80 wire ribbon, might be easier to buy the ribbon and connector's sep

 

You'll probably notice games loading sightly faster,and generally Windows 98 will run faster under XDSL with the ASUS ATA133 cables. (at least mine works fine,and that's with the stock 64MB)

 

I found a site that sells the 3 different color connectors, $2.50 each, and cable for $0.99/ft.
Same site sells the connectors in 2 packs, single color, on eBay store, they want $8.99 but shipping's free. They need to sell a set of 3 one of each color.

You need ~2 feet of cable.

 

If you make your own cable, you need to take a couple things into consideration.
The "Cable select signal wire" only runs from the master connector to the mobo connector.
One of the other signal wires only runs from the slave connector to the master connector, and not to the mobo connector.
This last one might not be the case in all cables. It's possible that the pin is not connected on the motherboard.

They usually remove the pins from the connectors that shouldn't have a connection to that wire. In other cables, you can see a small piece of the wire removed.

 

Must be why there are 3 different colored connectors -- blue for host, grey for slave and black for master. I've not found specifics on the various connectors to know if there's any difference between each of them. It would make sense that they connect only to the specific pins needed to make a cable select (CS) compatible cable by just crimping them on, blue at the motherboard (host/controller) end, grey in the center for the DVD (slave) and the other end for the HDD (master).

Details can be found at:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confCable80-c.html
and more on CS at:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/conf_CS.htm

 

So the only difference between normal 80pin IDE and the CS-enabled cable (why would you need such thing,in an Xbox? The HDD will be set as master anyways.) is that the former has one pin blocked out and the CS-enabled cable has all the pins?

 

It's the other way around.
The master device has it's CS pin pulled to GND by the motherboard.
The slave device has it's CS pin floating (unconnected).
There is a pullup resistor on the device to make that input high when it's not connected.
To my knowledge, the factory settings of a xbox harddisk are cable select mode.
The problem would not be the harddisk but the dvdrom that would try to be master as well if it's jumpered for cable select and it's CS pin is pulled to GND.
There is also another wire that only connects from slave to master, and not to the host (motherboard), but that pin could simply be not connected to anything on the motherboard.

There is a pin missing to detect that it's an 80 wire cable as well. It's in the middle of the connector. There isn't even a hole in the plug.

 

I have never had an Xbox with its HDD jumper set to cable select. They have always been master.

Also as far as I'm aware the default 40wire isn't CS enabled nor are 80wire IDE cables.

Would need to check pin hole 28 on the slave connector to see if it's grounded or not.
( also the DVD drives don't have pin 28 missing )

 

Nobody said pin 28 is missing.
It's in fact pin 20 that is missing. If the pin would be there, you wouldn't be able to plug in an 80 wire pata cable.
If your pata cable has the blue, gray and black colored plugs, it will likely have the CS wire not connected on the slave connector.
My xbox dvd rom drive (samsung) I have in front of me isn't having a jumper to select master / slave / cable select. I have no idea how it's configured. It would make sense that it's always slave. As the harddisk is connected to the plug with the cs connected to the mobo, it should always work as master, either with it's jumper on master or with it's jumper on cable select.

 

Fellas, these are what i use:


https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000I21Y28/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I ordered 1 a month ago just to test if they were long enough and if they worked Once i saw they were and they did, i ordered 2 more

This is after i ordered a pair that wasn't long enough:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0126SUXAK/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 <--- these were not long enough. I didn't even bother to send them back, being they were fairly cheap. lol

 

so got to ask as before..notice a difference in loading times?

 

The better question would be, did you notice measure a difference? Many people seem to say that there's usually a perceived placebo effect.

I, too, replaced the cable, because why not, it surely won't make things slower... but since I also swapped out the HDD at the same time, my measurements would be meaningless.

 

I haven't tested if there is a diiference, but I do know that the leaked bios is checking for and enabling dma 5 mode when possible.
I am unsure, but isn't that mode only supported if you user an 80 wire cable?
Obviously, you will need a hard disk that supports it as well. Not sure if the original 8Gig and 10Gig harddisks do.

If both conditions are fullfilled, it shoud allow for faster transfers.
Another question we could ask is if the harddisk transfer speed is the bottleneck or if there are others?

So, if someone with a harddisk that supports dma 5 could check loading times with an 80 wire cable and a 40 wire cable, we would know for sure. This test can't be that difficult since you still have the old cable.

So, instead of questioning, start testing... I am looking forward for the results.

I just checked, and even the original seagate ST310014 drive is referring to an 80 conductor cable for ultra DMA 3, ultra DMA 4 and ultra DMA 5 modes. So, those are supported.

As MS only used the harddrive for the storage of gamesaves and music files, speed probably wasn't important for them. (The dash also came from the harddrive)

 

Don't forget about the three(?) cache partitions. Those saw some heavy use and may well impact gameplay.

 

I didn't swap out the 80 grade 24" ide cable for loading speed increases. I did it because i was experiencing errors, using the 2TB hdd i installed in my tsop original xbox. its because the original ide cable can't handle the faster speeds of the sata hdd. once i replaced the cable, the error ceased.