Post by: LEDHaywire on August 17, 2003, 06:32:00 PM
Post by: mhr_54 on August 17, 2003, 08:38:00 PM
Post by: WodMan on August 17, 2003, 10:35:00 PM
Post by: rzyzzy on August 18, 2003, 09:18:00 AM
| QUOTE |
| However, if there is a possiblity of any damage please inform me. |
no damage to the board, however, since the cables wd ships are sooo short, if you stretch that snazzy new cable out too much you'll get a frag.
Post by: theBloodShed on August 18, 2003, 12:16:00 PM
| QUOTE (shahriyar @ Aug 18 2003, 04:41 PM) |
| dont have anything to lose. |
Nothing to lose except your time. There is absolutely NO possibility of a speed increase. None. As previous posts have mentioned, the XBox IDE controller can only support ATA33 transfers. The "better" cable you are refering to is an 80pin IDE cable for ATA66100133 connections.
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.
Anyway, try it and see.
Post by: chinmi on August 18, 2003, 12:24:00 PM
it will make it better,
because the higher quality of cable makes an error free data at transfer...
Post by: connector777 on August 18, 2003, 03:44:00 PM
Can anyone who has tried this please time somethings and let us know? If so, I will change my cable too.
One thing though... on my pc, I couldn't get my ata100 hard drive working until I switched cables, but on the xbox, it seems fine with the ata33 cable. Why is this???
Also, now I'm using a 160 gb hard drive on my xbox, it works fine, but I was wondering, if it ever got more than 137 gb, would it have problems like disappearing data or crashing?
There's a nice paper about ata 100 at
http://www.seagate.c...h_paper.qrk.pdf
Take a look, would a 80 wire cable help?
Post by: shahriyar on August 18, 2003, 04:37:00 PM
pizzle
Post by: connector777 on August 20, 2003, 09:30:00 AM
Post by: mhr_54 on August 20, 2003, 09:41:00 AM
Post by: EvilWays on August 21, 2003, 01:02:00 AM
| QUOTE (mhr_54 @ Aug 20 2003, 06:41 PM) |
| An IDE channel only supports two devices: one master and one slave. A cable with two connectors is one channel. You can't add a connector to your IDE cable for an extra drive due to this limit of two drives on a channel. |
No, it can only support two drives that are powered at the same time. See Project 411 on how a workaround was made. You can have as many drives as you can fit onto an IDE cable, but only two IDE devices can be powered per IDE cable/channel.
Post by: connector777 on August 21, 2003, 12:23:00 PM
Post by: public_enema on August 21, 2003, 12:54:00 PM
| QUOTE (connector777 @ Aug 21 2003, 08:23 PM) |
| I am adding 3 hard drives to my xbox via a switch on the power. But I need a longer ide cable, and I don't want to buy a crimper. So the easiest way for me is to add a male head and plug another ide cable in. Or have a male/male connector adapter. Do these exist? Would it work? Or should I just make a custom cable? |
Male IDE heads seem to be really hard to find for some reason - are you in the UK?
Post by: GuySmily on August 21, 2003, 01:02:00 PM
I haven't seen any male connecters anywhere, but I did desolder one off an old motherboard I have. The only challenge is soldering 40 wires to it..
Post by: spgurley on September 09, 2003, 02:07:00 PM
Post by: huiha on September 20, 2003, 06:54:00 AM
Post by: thejt on November 04, 2003, 12:32:00 AM
| 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!
Post by: networkBoy on November 04, 2003, 10:55:00 AM
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