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Rounding Out Your IDE Cables
BrookHarty sent us a story that proves that sometimes it's the little things that are clever. Are you as annoyed as I am that those pesky IDE cables are big flat things that are hard to move around? Well, here's a HOWTO that explains, well, how to round them out! It won't solve global warming or change the world. But dang it, that's cool.
> I'll bet that these kinds of cables eventually become the standard,
> especially if the cooling requirements for x86 hardware is going to
> start requiring 1lb. heatsinks like the upcoming P4...
You bet they will - but perhaps not why you think. SerialATA, the Intel-created (or just backed?) upcoming standard for connecting low-cost harddrives (i.e. non-SCSI drives) have cables about the size of a CD-Audio cable. Very cool (but not as cool as IEEE1394b). Very nice for cooling.
Weren't we all supposed to be using FireWire harddrives by now? *sigh*
The trick is to use your fingers (if you can) instead of a knife to avoid severing a cable.
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
Places like 2CookTek, teamawe, and Case ETC have the same products with better explanations of what you are buying at more reasonable prices. I guess the disadvantage is that you don't get to have a site with fancy animated GIF's.
Just in case you didn't know, a 66MHz square wave is made up of several (ok, really unlimited) different sine waves. You need to look at the rising and falling times of the signal if you want to calculate the RF produced.
Also, look at an FM transmitter. One inch of wire is enough to transmit a signal!!! Even AM doesn't require that big an antenna while it operates at a blazing 1MHz. The 66MHz signal will most definitely be producing a ton of RF.
The ground lines are nothing more than shielding in this case.
Are you serious? You really think putting a wire next to another wire will provide shielding? No, sorry bud, that's just not how it works. Shielding can be provided by completely surrounding the transmission line with a ground wire - like with your TV cable or RCA wires. An extra wire does nothing to stop RF.
So why do people put ground wires by transmission wires? It's actually not usually like that. The two wires aren't positive + ground, they're a differential pair, like your ethernet cable. The idea being that one wire is more positive then the other. So then when a pile of RF comes along and jolts the voltage up in those lines by 20%, the data isn't lost because the relative voltage of the two lines isn't effected. The second line protects against data corruption, not RF production.
This reminds me of a cool lab I did back when I was in school. Our class wired several RS232-RS422 converters to connect to the serial ports of different PCs. We then connected them all to a single differential pair (ie, two wires). After writing some software we had our entire lab networked via the serial port! Ok, it sounds lame but was great fun to implement.
Willy
IEEE1394a (current standard) tops out at 400Mbps (megaBITS). The upcoming IEEE1394b standard spans 800-3200Mbps.
SCSI drives are currently made with interfaces for 160MBps (megaBYTES), and the newest standard - don't know if it's finalized yet - is 320MBps.
Obviously, hard drives cannot transfer at anywhere NEAR those rates, BUT, there's still a reason for them: multiple drives! With the advent of RAID (ATA RAID controllers built-in to motherboards are all the rage now), then these speeds become much more justifiable.
The problem with FireWire hard drives is, as far as I know, there aren't any that have NATIVE FireWire interfaces on them - they're still ATA native devices with FireWire converters built-on to them (usually made by TI). From what I've read online, the current crop of TI chips aren't too efficient, but the next generation (due now or soon) are much better. Nevertheless, I'd feel better about harddrives (I prefer IBM these days) with native FireWire interfaces. Let's hope IEEE1394b gets here right quick.
The advantages of FireWire are numerous:
That's all I can think of right now - I'm sure there are more.
Eventually you won't have to worry about rounding out your IDE cables. Low-end hard drives will go from parallel ATA to serial ATA. Serial ATA cables will be nice and thin with a lot few fewer conductors. You can read more about this at serialata.org, but the basic idea is that hard drives will transition to a software compatible, 1.5 Gb/s serial connection. Among the benefits promised are "easier routing of cables." A serial ATA drive has already demoed but they're not promising systems until 2002.
A 80gb FireWire drive is $369... A 45gb drive is $250
A FireWire controller is only $100...
Why aren't you using FireWire drives yet?
The nick is a joke! Really!
GPL Deconstructed
use your fingernail to separate the cable is better than using an exacto knife. that will avoid cutting one of the wires in the cable. if you do, then you start all over. if you have to use a knife, just make a small inscision and tear down the length of the cable.
l es_howto/round_cable_howto _pg1.html
also, when you are separating, forget separating each individual strand. I'm not sure why this article said to do this. from my experience. just make an incision every 4-5 wires, and the cable will "round" (well, rectangle, really) just as well. less cuts means less chances to make a mistake!
lastly, i wouldn't even touch those ATA-66 cables. there are way more worries about possibly cutting one of the much thinner wires, and there is also mention of potential crosstalk interference with those high density cables. i have found that merely twisting the cable together so it "rounds" and then using zip straps works wonders. These ATA-66 cables are not as plentiful as the piles of 33 cables you have sitting around. don't split those!!!!
because i'm an [H]|OCP'er, check out their article on rounding too. at least it's only TWO freaking pages... fewer banner ads to distract you, i say. the [H]ard|OCP article also tells you about cable placements.
http://www.hardocp.com/articles/cooling/round_cab
Rounding cables like this is a time-wasting method of destroying all that paid-for engineering. Try one of these instead:
1. Look in the Newark (or similar) catalog and buy one, for pity sake.
2. Take the long section (what you are most concerned with), carefully fold it up lengthwise, and slide it into a length of half-inch split loom tube (any good parts store for about fifteen cents).
Either of these will get you where you wanted to be, which was moving that cable out of the way. Also note that IDE and especially ATA cables must be cut to a certain length to avoid possible SWR problems. You might also look up the proper folding and routing of ribbon cables, which seems to be a lost art among PC manufacturers these days.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
Wow, thats, um... neat, yeah, neat....
Buut seriously, why not just roll the cable , or bend it in half a safe distance from the end?
Ands how often do you actually get inside your computer? Bout' once a month for me.
This would help some people though, who work on computers alot, because I have severed wires on computer shrapnel (sharp little corner and crap)
Here's place that sells them pre-rounded. You can get rounded cables for ATA33, ATA66/100, floppy, and SCSI 50-pin.
At 66MHz IDE cables are going to look like a transmission line and I assume that is why there are so many earth connections in parallel with the signal wires. If you separate them then you could end up with a mismatch, more RF interference and possibly data corruption.
If you are going to try it out then backup your data first and make sure that you have a spare cable in case you break something
There's one more reason: it's cheaper. Ribbon cables use insulation-displacement connectors which are gang-crimped onto the cable in one operation. Easy, fast, and reliable. And since very few of us actually care, a manufacturer is going to go with whatever saves money.
I saw a similar article to this a few months ago, and did it. It's not easy work. An hour or so sitting at my desk carefully splicing these cables with an exact-o-blade isn't exactly fun. I did end up cutting into a couple of the cables, and needed to spend about $15 in new cable, but its not that bad. You just have to be really careful that when you cut into the cable that you hit directly into the groove between the wires.
But in the end, it all turned out well, and my system looks a lot less cluttered on the inside as a result, and my graphics card temperature dropped by a few degrees (my IDE cables were sitting over my GeForce fan).
So if you have the patience, go for it. Its definitely worth it I think.
-Julius X
-Julius X
remove "-whatkindofspamdoyoutakemefor-" from email to send
Floppy cables can be rounded (you can even remove the middle connector), the older IDE cables can be rounded, and 50 pin SCSI wires can also be rounded. Bind everything together at the end with zip ties and then wrap it up with spiral wrap from Radio Shack and similar (e.g. Ax Man in the Twin Cities).
ATA/66 and 68 pin SCSI cables are a different story. The wires are stiff, and if you don't do the cable exactly right, you have either trashed an expensive cable, corrupted the data on your hard drive. People seem to have mixed success with those.
If you want to mess with your cables, try some old junky ones, first. If you must use a knife or razor, make the incision as small as possible, then peel the cable apart in opposite directions -- those grooves are the path of least resistance, so it should be more reliable than making a long, perfectly straight cut with a small sharp object.
If you want rounded cables and don't want to take any risks, I know that Plycon has all sorts of high quality machine made cables of all types, albeit for a very steep price (just like everything else they sell).
I'm still not sure why this isn't the standard. Some PC manufacturers have been doing this in their servers and micro towers to improve airflow through the chassis. I'll bet that these kinds of cables eventually become the standard, especially if the cooling requirements for x86 hardware is going to start requiring 1lb. heatsinks like the upcoming P4...
WARNING: the above comment does not link to goatse.cx
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