"Arno Wagner" wrote in message
In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage TE Cheah wrote:
Per www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/confCable-c.html
"Using the middle connector and leaving the end connector unattached
..... leaves part of the cable "dangling". This is called a stub and creates
much worse electrical characteristics on the cable, due to reflections
from the unterminated ends of the cable wires. It is not recommended."

I 1st ignored this warning, & found my Toshiba cd drive ( using cable
select, & assigned by Award bios as 2nd channel's slave device )
though can play any VCD just as well, cannot pass BCM diagnostic (
blue screen of "fatal error" appears in Win98se ) unless I use the end
connector of this 80 wire cable to connect this drive ( i.e. bios
assigned as master device ) to my ( VIA ) kt266a 's hdd controller.

Does any1 here have a similar experience ? If this warning is valid,
then why does no mboard / hdd / cdd / dvd / cable manufacturer warn
users of this requirement ?

First, IDE cables are not terminated.

Neither are SCSI.

That means that for the drive on the middle connector it makes no difference
whether there is a drive at the end or not!

Yes it does. Even more so, in fact.

If anybody says different, then they do not understand the subject matter.

Practicing before that mirror again, babblemouth?

It's you who obviously doesn't understand.

In SCSI cables (what likley causes the confusion) it is a different matter:

No. it's not. Just a different solution to a problem.
Terminators come seperate from drives.

The last device on an SCSI bus _is_ terminated and havinf no device there
either means the bus is not terminated or it is teminated somewhere in the middle.

Utter nonsense, clueless as always.
Drive internal terminators were last seen on
Ultra SCSI devices and only on few of those.

Both useually cause mor or less secvere problems.

Have you been boozing again, babblemouth?

Again, the same is _not_ true for IDE cables.

Corse it is.

The device at the end does _nothing_ for signal quality when
the controller and the device in the middle talk to each other.

Corse it does. And it's not different to SCSI either.

From the point of view of the device in the
middle, the end-connector is allways empty.

Gee, where is the difference with SCSI there.

The only exception is during the power-on sequence,

Nonsense.

but not during normal operation.

That said, yes, the electical characteristics are worse, but any
well-designed IDE device needs to be able to deal with it.

And with Ultra DMA they do by introducing series termination.
It's on the drives that can do Ultra-DMA.

[Stupid off-topic rant snipped]


Arno