Re: PATA HDD and only 2 IDE connectors

keith wrote: 
On Sun, 09 Oct 2005 20:49:13 -0600, Rob Stow wrote:


keith wrote: 


Have you tried a LiteOn?  It works for me (not sure what PQDI has to do
with it).


I've tried LiteOn CD burners. They were pure crap so I never considered LiteOn when I went shopping for a DVD burner for myself. 


Mine work fine, as does the one that I put in for a friend.  Again, I
bought them under recommendations from people here (I was a Ricoh and
Plextor fan before) and haven't been dissapointed.  I don't see any reason
to buy Plextor now.

I also love not having any ribbon cables in my system.  In addition to
making it much easier to tinker inside the case, it became noticeably
quieter and motherboard temps dropped 3'C when I replaced my two IDE
hard drives with larger SATA drives and was able to get rid of the last
ribbon cable.


No ribbon cables. Round IDE works wonders. 

I /had/ rounded ribbon cables.  Never found them to be much better than
flat ones. They were so inflexible that I still had to disconnect them
from the motherboard so that I could get them out of the way any time I
wanted to change a DIMM, etc.


Not an issue here. I have them routed behind the drive cages; completely
out of the way. I could never do that with flat cables, even with an iron. 


My SATA ports are at the bottom of the motherboard, so I have my cables
running underneath the bottom of the motherboard and then up between the
backplane and the right-side panel of the case. Cables just don't get
any more out of the way than that.


Mine are at the bottom/back. I route them up the back and on the backside
of the drive bays, then around to the drives. With the round cables
there is no problem with getting a twist wrong. 

I'd *NEVER* run any cable on the back side of the board.  Tha't just
asking for trouble.

I've got about 6 mm between the backplane and the right-side case panel: *plenty* of room for SATA cables. Plenty of room for IDE ribbon cables too, for that matter, except that IDE cables don't have the length to take that route.

Nothing for the SATA cables to snag on either, so any unneeded length in a SATA cable can easily be tucked into that gap and then it easily pulls out if I need a little slack while connecting/disconnecting drives. No kinks in the cables either - nice easy loops where they go under the backplane and where they come out at the top of the backplane.

And - so far - no signs of wear and tear on the cables from them possibly vibrating between the backplane and the case panel.

And I want to make sure that you know that I am *not* talking about using the gap between the motherboard and the backplane. It is the gap on the *other* side of the backplane that I am babbling on and on about.



> I would agree with you if

SATA delivered power via the cable (eliminate the steenkin' cables crom
the PSU), but it doesn't, so I'm less than thrilled with it.  Worse,
the PSU that came with this case has Molex ATA power cables, so an
adapter is required, making things even more messy (not to mention the
SIL SATA controller/driver doesn't like Linux). I doubt that I'll buy
another SATA drive for some time.



Lately I've been using "Silencer 470" PSU's from www.pcpowercooling.com
that have 6 SATA connectors.  SATA power into a SATA drive is not
significantly better than plugging a molex connector into an IDE drive,
but it is a lot better than dicking around with molex-to-SATA adapters.



Agreed. I just don't see any advantage to SATA drives.  I thought I did
before I bought one.  :-(


Performance-wise, I find SATA and IDE to be six of one and half a dozen of the other. I merely appreciate what I can do with the longer and more flexible SATA cables in order to get them out of the airflow inside the case and to route them permanently out of my way for when I tinker inside the case.
.

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