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[huiha]

[thejt]

QUOTE (LEDHaywire @ Aug 18 2003, 03:32 AM)

there is no real speed increase from an ide cable switch. data is only gonna shoot through at ata100 speeds.

WRONG!   I love XS forums, If it wasnt for them I probably wouldnt have a modded xbox.  There is a weath of good information here.. BUT there is also alot of garbage!

So Haywire..  If the XBox comes with a ATA33/66 40 pin cable.. HOW is the data gonna "shoot" throught at UDMA 100 speeds?  ITS NOT!

QUOTE (WodMan @ Aug 18 2003, 07:35 AM)

You can change the cable, however the bottleneck does not lie in the cable, rather in the chipset that is on the system board.  Changing the cable will not increase performance.

WRONG AGAIN!!

Ive been researching the actual specifications of the Xbox southbridge and have found the following.  

The XBox uses the NVidia MCPX chipset which DOES support UDMA100 transfer rates.  So apparently thats not the bottleneck.

The MCPX is virtually the same as its PC bigger brother Nforce's north and southbridge (IGP and MCP) combined.  Here is more info.
http://www.inqst.com...rce/article.htm

QUOTE (theBloodShed @ Aug 18 2003, 09:16 PM)

Lets put it this way, cables are a hell of a lot cheaper than controllers.  Do you honestly think that MS would impliment a highspeed IDE controller (66100133) but use a 40-pin cable that can only handle ATA33?  That would be pointless.

YES!  THEY WOULD!!  MS didnt design the chipset for the Xbox.. and being that the chipset that NVidia designed supports ATA100 I would find it highly unlikely to re-engineer it to a lower specification.  But.. MS DID have to source IDE cables and obviously wanted to save some cash.  Which is logical on their behalf because 99.99999% of data transfer on the "factory" xbox is from a ATAPI dvd drive only capable of DMA33 anyway!!!!  Now that alot of us are using the hard drive for the main means of storage it makes all kinds of sense to have the ATA100 cable.

So.. with that said..  I look at it like this... Hmm the IDE controller supports ATA100, If you have a 80 pin ATA100 cable and a ATA100 Hard drive... why wouldnt you be gettting ATA100 transfer rates.  Since there is no real benchmark I guess we wont know until someone writes a HDD benchmark app for the Xbox.  I will say that it seems to load my games faster since the upgrade... BUT... were talking milliseconds at times if that so I could be halucinating or just being hopeful.

I know Im using the ATA100 even if for some reason it doesnt give me ATA100 transfer rates... cuz after all.... It is a higher quality cable right!

[networkBoy]

All of the speed stuff aside,
I have seen many people attaching multiple drives to the IDE bus and switching the power to the drives to control what's "on" the bus.  There is one serious flaw with this which may not be evident to people.  The connected drives which are not powered are still physically connected to the IDE bus.  These drives still represent an electrical load.  The drivers in the active devices need to work harder to overcome this additional load.  Ultimately this will reduce the service life of the drives and controller.  Whether or not something else dies first. . .

Granted that is is working for several people, I'm just waiting for it to kill someone's box that was marginal anyway.  The IDE specification defines 3 devices total for a reason.
-nB