Round IDE Cable for DVD/RW

Steve Mavronis

Steve Mavronis

New Member
I'm now looking to replace the IDE ribbon cable that came in my PC in an effort to help clean up the sloppy cable job that my computer manufacturer did. I'm also going to re-route the black power and red SATA cables and tie them up out of the way. Here is a picture of my BTX case interior as shipped by Gateway to be from a year and a half ago. You can see the mangled original ribbon cable in grey that goes between the motherboard and connects to 2 DVD/RW drives in the top bays:

fx530_small.jpg


I'm looking for a "round" IDE cable to buy on Newegg to replace the ribbon cable and make it look cleaner and improve air flow inside the case. Here is their products page link for IDE cables:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010010001%20117752968&name=IDE

Do I have to look out for anything like the ATA number, max cable length, etc?
 
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Doesnt matter too much, as long as you get one thats long enough for your drives it should work just fine....But in all honesty you would be better off just putting in some higher speed fans imho.
 
You want to make sure you are getting ATA133 and as far a length goes don't go over 18 inches, that is the offical spec for ATA133. You can find cables longer but it will reduce performance.
 
I just took an 18" strip of paper and marked off 6" from one end to account for the 2 optical drive positions. It looks like it would fit.
 
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