HELP Shortening round P-ATA cables

[andywierd]

Please help

I want to use some shorter cables to connect my drives I currently have 12" of spare cable floating round the case making it look very untidy (on 1 drive)

I have read that you can just cut the unwanted connector and cable off and this will work fine (leaving two connectors and a short cable)

Has anyone done this with a round P-ATA cable?

Does it matter which 2 connectors you leave? (I would like to use the 2 closest to each other but that would normally be the slave and master connectors)(I think the master acts as a terminator so I don't think it will matter)

Apart from ensuring none of the cables can short to each other when done is there anything else I need to be carefull off if I do this?

Alternatively does anyone know somewhere I can buy some short single device cables in the UK?

Thanks in advance for any assistance you may offer

Regards
AndyWierd

[snowwie]

yeah you can cut it off no problem
just make sure the jumper on your drive is right and that the pins line up (pin1 on mobo to pin1 on drive)

[andywierd]

Thanks Snowwie :clap: ,

I take it you are talking from experience

The locator's on the connectors will make it impossible for me to get them wrong (good job too :rolleyes: )

The jumper will be set to master so should be fine I would guess
(anyone know what would happen if it was set to cable select? :shrug: (I would think it would pick it up as a master drive))

Regards
Andywierd

[Celeron_Phreak]

I've built a few PATA cables in the past, thanks to an IDC crimpier my dad has and the near by Radar Electric which sells the 36 - 40 pin IDC connectors. I'll ask a friend across seas how much it'd cost me to ship cables that way and, if you like, I might be able to send you some custom length IDE cables. I've got more ribbon cable here than I know what to do with.

Cable select 99.9% of the time requires a special cable (controller to?) to operate correctly, and I've only used it ONCE, but that was on an old old computer. Last time I had a drive set to CS, it was detected but unusable, and in some cases just not recognized at all.

[andywierd]

Hi

Thanks for the suggestion

I tried the cutting method yesterday and I now have a 4" UV reactive round cable that works fine :)

I did not want to cut the cable and find it would not work, the cable select question was just something which occurred to me and I thought someone might have come across the issue before.

Now if I could only get the audigy card to work I can call this system complete and ready to try some small overclocks

It is the first system I have even concerned myself over the looks and I am quite impressed with how it has gone, normally anything I do looks like it just got ejected from a scrap heap for looking scruffy (I hope to post some pics soon)

Thanks again for all you help

Regards
Andywierd