Niall O Broin wrote:
>> On Tue, Jun 06, 2000 at 01:33:07AM +0100, Paul Kelly wrote:
>> > With a 40-way cable you can use an ATA66 drive on a regular IDE channel,
> > and an ATA33 drive on an ATA66 channel. It's all nice and backward
> > compatible that way.
>> Lots of answers about this - thanks everybody. I knew that the drives and
> controllers were backwards compatible, but what I was wondering was how,
> physically. I asked about the special cable because I was wondering how the
> 80 way ATA/66 connector connected to a 40 way connector on a motherboard. I
> gather that this is via an ordinary 40 way cable. Presumably this means that
> an ATA/66 drive has a 40 way and an 80 way connector on the back, or what ?
Nope, it has a 40 pin interface, exactly the same both physically and
electrically as an ATA33 one.
The difference in the cable is that the intervening lines are either
ground or polarity reversed, which makes the signal far more stable. The
physical break in one of the cables lets an ATA66 drive know that it
has a high-quality cable : if it doesn't see that then it'll fall back
to ATA33.
So, absolutely every component is backwardly and forwardly compatible
with every other, but if all of the devices are ATA66 compliant then
they'll use ATA66. If any of them don't, they won't.
Vin
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