Modern PC's and old ATA drives?

On 13 Aug 2007 at 10:57, John Foust wrote: ...And that's the nasty, ugly, thing about PATA cables. It's the *cable* that indicates to the host that the drive is UDMA4-capable, not the drive itself. You can't mix UDMA4 and non-UDMA4 drives on an 80-conductor cable; you must use a 40 conductor cable and operate both drives as non-UDMA4 types. Similarly, the spiffiest UDMA4 drive won't do the UDMA4 thing on a 40- conductor cable and a non-UDMA4 drive will be driven as if were UDMA4- capable with an 80-conductor cable, giving one nothing but grief. I can recall getting complaints about one of our software packages *creating* data errors on drives. It turned out that the system owner was using an 80-conductor cable on a non-UDMA4 drive. The setup worked just enough to lull him into thinking that everything was cabled correctly. The outcome was that he blamed the software. Cheers, Chuck