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[rzyzzy]

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I've tried to put an 80 pin cable in before, but all the ones I have are too short. Do I have midget cables or something?

It was *very* difficult to get my ata/66 cable installed without stretching it, and it's not nearly as neat as MS's longer cable, there is no way to reproduce the folds of the original  - but I was able to do again on several other xboxes with the cables included with Western Digital and Maxtor retail drives.  

I've ran across a site in the past that mentioned "certified" ata/66 cables that were 18" - they also offered 24" ata/66 cables but they did not say the longer ones were "certified".  I was able to find another vendor who mentioned ata/66 cable length

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# Please note: some controller cards and Ultra UDMA 66/100 devices cannot recognize a cable that is longer than 18". Please check your manuals.

As to length affecting the speed of data transfer, I'd have to say it *should* affect speed -  at least on a theoretical basis - how much hype has there been over the years about chip manufacturers moving the cache on the chip, as opposed to on the motherboard?  

Based on my own experience, it seems to speed things up a bit.  Just like a 7200 rpm hard disc does, and a hard disc with an 8 meg cache does as well.  Is it worth paying alot of money for that performance?  Probably not - I haven't noticed a difference in actual gameplay when using an Xbox with an ata-66 cable, or  a 7200 rpm 8 meg cache hard disc - just a slightly faster load time and a slightly faster transfer rate on ftp transfers.  And I'm not talking more than a few seconds on a 3 gig transfer.  

That said, I usually buy retail packaged hard discs because they have a much better warranty than oem drives - as a nice extra they include the ata 66 cable, why not throw it in?

[trob]

Again, thanks for the info rzyzzy.  I do know that some 18" cables can vary almost 1/2".  I work with pcs all the time and I had a whole box to surf thru.  I got the longest 18" ATA/66 I could find (funny isn't it).  It still is a very close fit, also be careful because when crossing the top of the dvd and hd with the cable it almost goes over one of the screw holes in the middle.  Be careful to move it away a little so you dont damage the cable when you screw the cover back on.