Second hard drive: What does this mean???

External Since: Nov 26, 2003 Posts: 11

Treat me as stupid, because I obviously am. (I'm much more familiar
with laptops than desktops.)

Clever me. I decided add a second hard drive (removable) in my office
desktop, a Compaq Deskpro 6000 series (old: Pentium 2). There's a
spare drive bay, after all.

But I open it up but there's no place to plug in the drive. Only one
connector on the ribbon cable leading to my hard drive; only one on
the ribbon cable leading to my CD-Rom drive (with a much smaller
connector to the board); no other obvious places to plug in. There is
a spare power connector, however.

So I decided to RTFM and it says:

"Two 40-pin keyed IDE data connectors (one for each controller) are
provided on the system board. Each connector can support two devices
and can be configured independently for PIO modes 1-4, DMA modes 1-2,
or Ultra DMA modes 0-2. In standard configurations with an IDE drive
the hard drive is attached to the primary connector and the CD-ROM (if
installed) is attached to the secondary connector.

NOTE: Both controllers support UATA mode 2 (33 MB/s). If a second
drive is to be operated in UATA mode 2 off the same controller the
standard 40-conductor cable must be replaced with an 80-conductor
cable (available as an option) is required. Running two drives in UATA
mode 2 with the standard 40-conductor cable produces CRC errors (due
to electrical crosstalk) that will cause the BIOS to switch to UATA
mode 1 (25 MB/s)."

I'm pretty confused. An 80-pin cable fits into a 40-pin connector on
the board??? Can I buy a new ribbon cable with secondary connector on
it?? Or what else do I need to do???

And no, I can't call my IT folks. IT's a midnight upgrade...

External Since: Nov 06, 2003 Posts: 321

Higgins wrote:

> But I open it up but there's no place to plug in the drive. Only one
> connector on the ribbon cable leading to my hard drive; only one on
> the ribbon cable leading to my CD-Rom drive (with a much smaller
> connector to the board); no other obvious places to plug in. There is
> a spare power connector, however.

The connector on the ribbon cable for the CD-ROM drive should be the
same size as that for the hard drive. Unless it's a really old
proprietary CD-ROM...

> I'm pretty confused. An 80-pin cable fits into a 40-pin connector on
> the board??? Can I buy a new ribbon cable with secondary connector on
> it?? Or what else do I need to do???

Just because the cable is 80-conductor, that doesn't mean that the
connector has 40 pins. In the case of IDE, it's 40-pin either way.

If you have an available IDE connector on the motherboard, then get a
cable and plug the new drive into that. Otherwise, you can get a
replacement IDE cable with 3 connectors. (An IDE channel supports 2
devices)

-WD