IDE, E-IDE, UltraDMA Confusion

Mrgreen371

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I realize this isn't the best (right) forum for this topic but the Other Components forum has little activity.

Excuse me being a total newbie. I'm a little confused with all of these terms. Without getting into to much detail let me ask a few specific questions.

1. Looking at dvd burners at newegg, some are ATAPI/E-IDE and some are IDE. Is there a difference? (my guess is no).

2. Looking at the Asus P5W DH Deluxe under storage there is a *1 x UltraDMA 100/66/33 and a *1 x UltraDMA 133/100/66. What is the difference?

3. Still looking at the P5W DH Deluxe under Accessories there is an IDE cable and a UltraDMA 133/100/66 cable. What is the difference?

4. Can I forgot all this BS and just use a SATA dvd drive?
 
AT Attachment (ATA) is a standard interface for connecting storage devices such as hard disks and CD-ROM drives inside personal computers. Many terms and synonyms for ATA exist, including abbreviations such as IDE, ATAPI, and UDMA.
With the market introduction of Serial ATA in 2003, the original ATA was retroactively renamed Parallel ATA (PATA).Enhanced IDE (EIDE), is an extension to original ATA

Final analyst, you can get either the ATA (IDE) Drive or future proof yourself and get the SATA drive.
 
1. Looking at DVD burners at newegg, some are ATAPI/E-IDE and some are IDE. Is there a difference? (my guess is no).
Nope, you're correct here.
2. Looking at the Asus P5W DH Deluxe under storage there is a *1 x UltraDMA 100/66/33 and a *1 x UltraDMA 133/100/66. What is the difference?
DMA is Direct Memory Access. Its a means of data transfer between peripheral and host memory without processor intervention. To my knowledge these are its transfer speeds.
3. Still looking at the P5W DH Deluxe under Accessories there is an IDE cable and a UltraDMA 133/100/66 cable. What is the difference?
Same thing just synonyms for each other.
4. Can I forgot all this BS and just use a SATA DVD drive?
You got that right.
Feel free to ask anything else.
 
I realize this isn't the best (right) forum for this topic but the Other Components forum has little activity.

Excuse me being a total newbie. I'm a little confused with all of these terms. Without getting into to much detail let me ask a few specific questions.

1. Looking at dvd burners at newegg, some are ATAPI/E-IDE and some are IDE. Is there a difference? (my guess is no).
No there is no difference.

2. Looking at the Asus P5W DH Deluxe under storage there is a *1 x UltraDMA 100/66/33 and a *1 x UltraDMA 133/100/66. What is the difference?

The difference is the maximum transfer rate over the bus. UltraDMA 133 means the bus runs at 133MBps, etc

3. Still looking at the P5W DH Deluxe under Accessories there is an IDE cable and a UltraDMA 133/100/66 cable. What is the difference?

The DMA 133 cables I believe have more pins and don't work with below 100 HDDs.

4. Can I forgot all this BS and just use a SATA dvd drive?


The best thing would be to just go SATA. Lots of mobos are adding eSATA (external) for PnP of HDDs.
You can also PnP an internal SATA HDD. If you look at the SysTray with SATA you will see the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon.
Of course you wouldn't unplug your system drive while windows is running but it works great for replacing RAID drives.
 
4. Can I forgot all this BS and just use a SATA DVD drive?

You got that right.
Feel free to ask anything else.



Plextor is the only company that I know of that makes an SATA DVD-RW drive, and I assure you it is more of a hassle then its worth. A $40 IDE drive would be far easier and you can't really mess it up.
 
OK, lets see if I've got it. All of this pertains to the
Asus P5W DH Deluxe.

I’ll be getting one hard drive, SATA. The Asus P5W DH Deluxe comes with 2 SATA cables and 1 SATA power cable so I won't need to buy additional cable for that. I did read somewhere that I will need to create a SATA drive disk for windows XP, but then I read somewhere that I won't have to for this motherboard, so I should be good to go there right?

I can throw out any 40 wire IDE cables I have right?

I'll be getting one dvd drive, ATAPI/E-IDE or IDE and using an 80 wire IDE cable is no problem right? (Considering I won't be attacking ay hard drives to it.).
 
You should be good there. If you are goind to go RAID at somepoint you'll need a driver, but you can do install it without otherwise. You can use the 40 pin IDE cable for the drive that ASUS gives you (they label them and everything). You can use an 80 pin if you'd like, but there's no advantage.
 
Nice post, here's my question:

I have a asus_p4s8x-x

For IDE ports it has 2 x UltraDMA 133/100/ 66/33

I think i threw away the cable that came with the kit or used it elsewhere or...something, Im using what looks like a pretty old 40 pin cable.
Ergo Do cables have any affect on the data rates achievable (ie can you get UltraDMA 133/100/ 66/33 cables)?

Cheers,

ljmonkey
 


The UDMA66+ 80-way cable has 40 more ground cables to reduce error rates at high speeds.

You really don't want to use a 40-way cable on a modern drive if you want it to be fast and reliable; the OS might decide to slow it down to UDMA33, or you may get data errors which require the OS to read or write the data again.

Basically, an 80-pin cable is safe to use at UDMA33 speeds, but a 40-pin cable isn't safe to use at UDMA66 or above.
 


Yeah, that's what you need; the extra 40 wires are all connected to ground for shielding between the signal wires, so they don't need extra pins. I should have written more clearly in the original reply :).