Tim wrote: >> So, now, tell me how that equates to being wired "straight through"? Mike McCarty: > Well, if a cable isn't "crossed" it's "straight-through", even if not > all pins are connected. That's not "straight through". For it to be so, each and every wire has to connect to the same pins on each and every connector. Pin 1 to 1, pin 2 to 2, etc. If it's not straight through on all wires, then you cannot say it's straight through. Just try using any cable that's not completely wired up, still described as being straight through, but you needed the connections that were omitted. Granted that you probably won't *need* those wires on the IDE ribbon cable, but it's going down a very slippery slope when you start to redefine the meaning of descriptions so that the same thing means different things in different in different contexts, just because someone wants to be a pain. >> It's a very bad, VERY BAD, idea to outright lie to people. Do not tell > "Lie" is a very strong word in any language. It's an accurate one. When you tell untruths to people, you are lying. What's worse is when people don't know that you're doing so. Quite frankly, the poster went back and asserted some very wrong information, not just got it wrong. >> false people information as if it were fact. Over-simplifying things to >> the point that they are wrong is misleading. The people who take you at >> face value later have to unlearn all the bad information that they found >> out, which is a difficult thing to do. > Finding the balance between flooding a newbie with more info > than he can assimilate and giving completely accurate information > is a delicate operation. True enough, but don't mislead them. If the situation was explained properly in the first place, it wouldn't have been difficult. Now they have to wade through inaccurate, misleading, and just plain wrong answers, and the incorrect people vehemently defending their position against all the facts. Do we dumb down everything on here? Instead of telling someone what actually to do, or how something works, just tell them do this and reboot, or re-install, like Windows? >> If you know how transmission lines work, and bear in mind the >> frequencies involved, taking excess cable and rolling it up, folding it >> up, bundling it under drives, etc., can lead to all sorts of problems. > So can cutting it off, in my experience. Considering that IDE cables come in all sorts of lengths (they're not cut to resonance), whether you alter the length of a cable, or use one with a different length, makes no difference. Making them too long *does* cause problems, and having excess cable floating about *can*. >> I repeat, if you're NEVER going to use the excess, it's fine to cut it >> off. Doing so will do NO harm to the signalling, and can remove a >> plethora of wierd problems that people may encounter due to stuffing >> cables into any spare space. > True in theory, not so true in practice. I've seen cables which were > cut in this manner develop short circuits from whiskers from the > stranded wires touching in weird ways which are not easily seen with > the naked eye. Expecially in 80 wire cables, the stranded wire > is *quite* thin. So I wouldn't recommend it for someone who had > never shortened a cable before, unless he had some guidance nearby. > Thinking about someone just getting out a pair of scissors or dikes and > whacking away makes me cringe. I've not seen an 80-wire cable that uses stranded cable, it's all been solid. It's not difficult to cut ribbon cable. It's a childishly simple thing to do without any problems. Even with stranded cable I've never even had that problem occur when quickly cutting cables to place. No inspection revealed any problems. You'd have to be a complete hack to mess this up. I used to make custom SCSI leads all the time (they cost a fortune premade, but ribbon wire and IDC connectors are cheap, not to mention that you can make them to the precise dimensions to suit). > Also, it means that one cannot use CS (not that I want to) without > further surgery on the cable. Cable-select would be best avoided anyway. With single drives it's often necessary to set them specifically as single drives, you can't do that with any cable-select cable. Not to mention that anybody considering doing this sort of thing ought to have enough brains to set jumpers, too. Especially considering the amount of information that's been passed around on this thread! ;-) -- Don't send private replies to my address, the mailbox is ignored. I read messages from the public lists.
