What is the proper way to set up a drive to cable?

Most ata ide cables have 3 connectors on it that aren't marked with board, slave, and master. But when they are marked as such, the board is at one end, the master is in the middle and the slave is on the other end.

Is this how all ide cables are set for ata?



Also, what should you do if you only have one hard drive to hook up to the cable? I have read posts that you should not connect it to the middle main connector because then the end will act as an antennae and pick up noise that will interfere with the drive and data transmission. Do the ends need to be sorta terminated in this way like the scsi cables need to be? Does it really matter where the drive gets connected to on a cable by itself?

Should I use a 2 connector ide cable instead in cases where I am not adding a slave drive of a sort?



Lastly, I read also that putting a rom drive on the same cable as a hard drive greatly impacts the performance of the hard disk drive, even HP states that their drives will slow hard drives to the speed of the rom device attached to the same cable. Could this be the case with all rom drives?

All ide cables have the board and master connectors on the ends with the slave connector closer to the master connector.

If you have one drive it doesn't matter which one it is hooked up to. They are both the same. The ends do not need to be terminated. As far as acting as an antenna that picks up noise that interferes with data transmission, that isn't true. Using a cable with 2 connectors instead of three won't do anything for you.

If you have any two drives (type doesn't matter) using the same ide cable and you use them at the same time, performance will suffer.

This is where I read about the interference problems with ide cables.
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/42/2

Maybe the author was confusing the properties of scsi drives with pata drives.