Is a hard drive faster on a shorter IDE cable?

Hello,
I am considering connecting my main hard drive with a 24" IDE cable rather than using my 18" cable which I used previously. (The IDE cable therefore will be 6" longer.) Will this slow down the performance of the hard drive? My hard drive is a 40 GIG, 7200 RPM hard drive.
Also, if you configure a hard drive as a "slave" (rather than "master") does this reduce the performance of a harddrive?
Thanks,
PS: Both my 18" IDE cable and my 24" IDE cable are 40 pin IDE cables with 80 conductor wires rated for ATA/133. The difference is in the length only.

I have a shocking one for you. I just measured the
ribbon which used to be in my Beige G3/300MT and it
is about 140 cms long (For the normal people here, that's 52 inches) (purchased in a PC store),
and not only. It is a 40-wire cable, not an 80.
I used this to be able to connect and disconnect
everything with the case completely open (I hate
short wires.....).
This was connecting my "burner" and my storage hard
drive (master & slave) to one of the channels.
My emergency startup drive connected to the second
IDE channel and installed inside the case (near the
motherboard), and my main startup drive is a SCSI.
I haven't noticed any particular problems with speed.
Note that my storage drive was only accessed to copy
files onto it, not as a working directory, and
therefore mounted in that position as a slave on
purpose.
The IDE startup drive had a much shorter ribbon, also
a 40-wire cable.
The Sony burner used to clock just slightly over a
minute to burn an audio CD at 52x (yes, I know....it
is a little suicidal, but I like it), and got stuck
every now and then, but hey, what's life without a
few coasters?
The performance was excellent, and I think the flaws
were due mostly to the Beige, rather than the drive
(the drive still lived in my B&W until I got a DVD
burner), and now sits in a drawer awaiting new
assignments).
I also tried using the same ribbon in my B&W, just to
connect an extra drive (I didn't have any other
ribbons left), and it worked flawlessly.
cheers

Similar Messages

Does shutting down and starting up wear out the hard drive faster?

does anyone know if shutting down and starting up the imac repeatedly wear out the hard drive faster? I had heard that repeated shutting down and starting up of the hard drive will wear out the hard drive faster. If this is true, is it better to put the imac to sleep and shut down only when you absolutely have to or when you will be gone for a while? (e.g., going on vacation or when moving the imac). The imac manual suggests that if you are going to use the imac within a few days to put it to sleep and shut it down if you are not going to use it for a few days. Is this advice just to save you time since you don't have to reboot or will this help prolong the life of the hard drive? Of course, keeping the imac on all the time might waste energy (not sure if sleep mode saves energy). But since I use the imac practically everyday it may make sense to put it to sleep, especially if this will prolong the life of the hard drive. thanks

Good Morning,
In my experience there shouldn't be any unnecessary wear and tear on your hard drive from shutting down your computer unless you are doing an EXTREME amount of startup/shutdown cycles.
The average user should not put enough strain on the drive to even be noticed from normal startup/shutdown cycles.
Hope this helps! 
David

I am running my first backup on Time Machine using a Seagate external hard drive with a thunderbolt adapter and cable. I have a MacBook Pro 2011. It is backing up 11GB, and is telling me it will take approx two days. Is this normal?

I am running my first backup on Time Machine using a Seagate external hard drive with a thunderbolt adapter and cable. I have a MacBook Pro 2011. It is backing up 11GB, and is telling me it will take approx two days. Is this normal?

Download the supplemental fix to 10.7.5
http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1599

Short IDE Cables? Where to Purchase?

I need a short IDE cable. I only want one of about 6 inches, possibly less. I'd prefer rounded, but I'd settle for a flat cable.
Anyone know where to find such a thing? I've exhausted all my resources.
Thanks in advance.
Ean.

:biggthumbsdown:I appoligise, over here in England we use the sane metric system. We don't bring our kids up telling them how many pounds are in a stone!
The reason 90% of websites uses inches is because Americans seems to rely on Imperial mesurments Move on please, catch up with the rest of the world
Anyway, going back to the topic...
Once SATA has been properly instituted and Maxtor have fixed up the problems and a new version of Windows (or Linux) has been made that can properly deal with SATA drives we will no longer need these IDE cables.
SATA cables are brilliant pity about the drives themselves Maxtor

Hard drive failure message, and Short DST fail

Hello, and thanks
alright, this is the first time i have had this issue.
only thing on the computer that was changed recently was a windows update yesterday, it came up automatically, shut the computer down, and restarted automatically. Java has wanted to update for a couple days
if its worth anything, the error came up when i was watching instant streaming on netflix.
half a year old (maybe) Pavilion dm1
windows 7 64 bit
AMD E-350 precessor
product ID 00359-OEM-8992687-00010
gave me a warning message that hard disk drive failure was eminant, and adviced me to back up everything. computer seems to be functioning normal other than the error/warning message.
when i restarted the computer and ran the test that comes up i ended up with this, it says it may take over an hour, but this comes up after about a minute.
testing drive : 1
SMART Check: Passed
Short DST: Failed
Failure ID: 9LNF2M-5K55RT-MFH14J-60WA03
Product ID: XY961UA#ABA
Hard Disk 1
not sure where to go from here with it.
only other thing i have had happen with it is video driver crashes when i have a stale youtube video left in a tab. i assume that is unrelated, and i just trained myself to avoid that.
thanks! i appreciate the help.
matthew

Hello Frederic45.
You need to replace your hard drive. You should be able to purchase the parts on the notebook's HP Parts Surfer Page.
Had you previously created any Recovery Media such as a thumbdrive? Without this you'll be unable to reinstall the operating system when you replace your hard drive. You'll need to contact HP Support in order to get one of these kits. The number for US/Canadian customers is 1-800-474-6836. If you're in another part of the world you'll need to visit HP Support Worldwide to get your region's contact information.
Please click the white star under my name to give me Kudos as a way to say "Thanks!"
Click the "Accept as Solution" button if I resolve your issue.

More hard-drives = faster Virtual Memory ? or not...

2 internal HD's... only one is being used for Virtual Memory. If both were being used, it could double VM disk access - simultaneously uploading.
I know that buying Crazy Expensive Mac Pro RAM would sort the problem out, but i ain't going to do that any time too soon. Besides i might get a new hard-drive... and 3 drives should be able to do VM noticably faster.
does anybody know if i can set the second drive as a VM scratch disk also ?
- or what part of mac os x controls these Virtual Memory and disks and if that can be tweaked
- or are there any good little apps for controlling VM?
Thanks peeps.
nicholas.

Thanks.
I'm not going to do that, though it is certainly of interest. I had a thread on another board which went from "use a raid single" to "you cheepscate buy ram" too quickly for my liking.
Of interest from that was :
1) Not having ram is bad when it hits disk VM - that's the slow bit.
1.1) so if you buy a little, that will raise the ceiling and you'll hit VM less often. Every titchy bit helps.
2) if you never go beyond your ram - more ram is wasted.
3) with some EXPERT tweaking performance can be gained from controlling where VM pages to - but really either buy ram or use less apps.
4) the reason i brought it up was flight sim mode on google earth (apple alt a). Which is a waste of time anyway ! But that sometimes freezes and writes to disk for 5-10 seconds. My professional apps, are almost always in ram, so i think i'll forget it. Or buy ram.
5) if you want to know if you need ram - look at activity monitor - but combine "free AND inactive" to see how much/little is spare. Also read the "vm page ins".. if there are lots (7,000 in 10 minutes) you're into slow VM land.
really... it's only apparent because the mac pro is lightning fast most of the time, and WHEN you're waiting on the HD - even though it's still running really fast - it is more apparent.
Thanks everyone. Happy Mac'in.

Advise for adding larger internal hard drive & faster processor

After five years it is time to make some upgrades to my G4 Quicksilver 733 MHz Tower. The hard drive is nearly full and the processor doesn't seem as fast as it once did (especially after using my faster PowerBook G4). I want to replace the 40GB hard drive with a 128GB hard drive. What is the best way to transfer the data and information (applications, etc.). Should I add it as a second hard drive and transfer the data that way then remove the original one? Perhaps I should move all my data from an aux hard drive I have. Should I do a clean install of the operating system and then transfer the rest of the data? If you make a second hard drive I guess you have to identify one as a "master" and the original one as the "slave", or should I do it the opposite way? Any advise would be helpful. Also I want to upgrade to a 1.8 duel processor. One person told me I may be disappointed with the results since the speed of the mother board limits the performance of the processor. Is that true? I have already maxed out the RAM so I should be fine there. Any advise to these issues would be most appreciated.

Hi
You could use a utility like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper to clone your existing drive:
http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html
http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html
Alternatively you could just reinstall everything from scratch. I tend to do a reinstall and have a bit of a clean out, only reinstalling those apps etc I still actually use.
I'd have both drives installed internally to do the cloning or transferring of data across after a reinstall. You could then remove the original drive or just leave it for use as a backup disk or temporary storage area etc. With two drives installed, one will need to be set to master and one to slave. With one drive installed, it will need to be set to master. I don't think it really matters which way around you do it.
In terms of processor upgrades, the 133MHz system bus/memory will become a bottleneck at some point, but it partly depends on which applications you're using at the time and whether they're processor bound or bandwidth starved. IMHO there's a sweet spot where you get the most bang for the buck. A higher clocked processor would probably still be faster in real world terms, but I suspect you get diminishing returns for the extra cost involved.
When I upgraded my Quicksilver, I intended to get a single 7455 based processor upgrade from OWC. They're resonably priced and tend to be faster in real world usage than a 7447 based processor upgrade running at the same clock speed due to the extra level 3 cache (which partly helps to offset the limited bus speed). In the end though I managed to get a dual 1GHz processor card pulled from another Quicksilver in OWC's clearance section. The advantages were it's an original Apple part which didn't require any firmware updates, software patches or additional fans etc. The disadvantages were it's a four year old part with a limited warranty and the heat sink had to be reattached using thermal paste etc.
I hope this helps.

Scratch hard drive crashed! Any recovery ideas?

So my scratch drive is a 1TB Seagate portable drive with a thunderbolt adapter. It has the raw files as well as the project files and auto-save files. I have a back up of the raw video files but not the project file. The .PRV folder for the project is still sitting here on my computer's local drive (iMac) with several .xmp and .mpgindex files in it. After a full week of editing, I finished a project, exported it. Created the custom DVD menu and was halfway through burning when I got a hardware error through Encore CS6 (Sense Code: 30c00). Tried again, gets halfway through then error. Thinking it was my computer, I copied the Encore files to the portable scratch drive (which seemed to be working fine btw at that point), ejected it and put it on my other iMac to burn from there. The drive wasn't recognized. I brought it back to the original computer and now it wasn't recogzized there either. Oh crap. The drive lights up, sounds like its working, but just doesn't show up using any of its adapters/ports (thunderbolt, usb, firewire).
I'm dealing right now with data recovery options through Seagate ($$$$) and Best Buy but in the meantime. Does having the project's PRV folder do me any good? Again, I have a back up of the raw video files...I just need the Premiere Project file. On my way to Best Buy now to see if its the enclosure and not the drive that has issues (read somewhere that that might be the issue since it is lighting up when plugged into the computer and it is running, just not showing up).
I know it's probably a long shot, but I'm sure you all can understand what I'm feeling right now having finished a huge project. Just checking in here to see if there's some other magic way of recovering a Project File without the drive that it's stored on?
Nightmare.

Well...no replies but that's okay. It's been a whirlwind 24 hours with no luck at recovering anything off the crashed hard drive at Best Buy or via Seagate Tech Support. Just as I sat down to re-edit the project from the beginning (ugh!) after about 60-70 hours of work lost a thought hit me:
"When auto-save reaches the maximum number of copies, it starts replacing the oldest ones. Does it replace them, or write over them?"
Either way, I thought maybe it's worth looking into recovering deleted files and sure enough, I googled just that and found www.recovering-deleted-files.net ...Now this may sound like a commercial but you can imagine how floored I was to do a quick sweep of my local drive and there they were, my .prproj files waiting there for me!! Even though my original project files and auto saves were on the crashed hard drive only. A quick $99 bucks (to actually unlock the recovery part of the app (the search part is free)) and I had my project files back!!!
Now, everyone reading this may not care, but my day instantly did a 180 and I felt like sharing. Who knows maybe someone else will one day hit this thread looking for a way to recover their crashed project files. Now, what's weird is that there were like 5 different recovered project files and each one contained only one of the four original sequences and files associated with that sequence. There wasn't one single project file that had all of the sequences that I edited like the original project file did, but right now, I don't care. I had to redo a few of the image files that I had in there that I had created in PS and saved on the crashed drive but because I had the original video files, I just link/located the videos and I'm back in business...literally.
Going forward...I think I may have my auto-save folder on a different hard drive than my project files. Just in case. Also, looks like I'll be looking into a good, new fast external scratch drive for my mac. What a day.

My BT keyboard delete button now forward deletes rather than backspacing like it used to do. This happened after I got my iMac back from the hard drive replacement program. Any ideas how to return the keyboard to the default backspace?

The good news after my hard drive was replaced during Apple's Seagate replacement program -- all my data and settings reinstalled seamlessly through Time Machine and my external hard drive. Bad news? My BT keyboard will now only forward delete when I hit the delete key rather than backward delete. I find this so ironic since I hated this feature when I switched from PC to Mac, but now I'm totally used to it. I tried resetting the default under system preferences, but it didn't help. Otherwise, keyboard works perfectly. This is so strange. Anyone have any suggestions? Oh -- and now I see my arrows don't work either.
Message was edited by: juliefrommiami

The good news after my hard drive was replaced during Apple's Seagate replacement program -- all my data and settings reinstalled seamlessly through Time Machine and my external hard drive. Bad news? My BT keyboard will now only forward delete when I hit the delete key rather than backward delete. I find this so ironic since I hated this feature when I switched from PC to Mac, but now I'm totally used to it. I tried resetting the default under system preferences, but it didn't help. Otherwise, keyboard works perfectly. This is so strange. Anyone have any suggestions? Oh -- and now I see my arrows don't work either.
Message was edited by: juliefrommiami

Hi, I can't transfer my iPhotos onto my external hard drive....any ideas why please?

I am using a Macbook Air and trying to transfer onto an external Toshiba hard drive, but it wont let me copy the file across?

Did you not read what Léonie wrote:
reformatting will erase its content.So you need to save any files to a different drive before reformatting to MacOS Extended Journaled.
How much more plainly did you need it written?
You also got warned when you reformatted with Disk Utility.
Now you're only hope is expensive file recovery software.
File Salvage - you can download a free trial and it will scan the disk for you and tell you with might be recoverable. Actual recovery will require that you purchase the app. There may be many files with the same or similar names. Always recover the largest file size.
There are other such apps. Search on Macupdate or the App Store

My old motherboard went down and now trying to transfer old bookmarks from old hard drive to new installation, any ideas how i can do it ?

Trying to import my old book marks from my old version of firefox on my old hard drive which I now have as a buddy onto my new system and re installed firefox. Any one have any ideas ?
Regards
Richard UK

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Recovering+important+data+from+an+old+profile
Your old Profile is located here in Vista & Win7: <br />
''drive'':\Users\''Windows login user name''\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\''profile_name''

Is this external hard drive fast enough?

Looking at this drive It is FW 800 and 7200 rpm.:
http://store.apple.com/us/product/H0303VC/A?fnode=MTY1NDA0Nw&mco=MTczMTA1MDI
Is there some other spec to look at or is it fast enough to edit directly off of?
Thanks.

Using what Macintosh with what version of FCP, and what camcorder?
The drive is fine, but only for specific sequences and codecs.
Help us out.
Internal RAID drives from iStoragePro, Caldigit, and G-Tech are also good but tailored to the type of work you are doing that you need to identify.

Short IDE cable for B&W?

Does anyone here know where/if I might be able to find a 2-device IDE (Ultra ATA) cable shorter than the usual 18 inches (i.e., right-sized for the B&W with two IDE drives in the stack bracket)? I am currently using an 18" Ultra ATA cable that shipped with one of my current drives, and am concerned about that much cable stuffed into a fairly small space--particularly where airflow is concerned. With my B&W freezing up regularly (see my post in the Usage forum), I would like to mitigate any heat-related factors if possible.
Thanks for any assistance/insight you can provide.
Pete

That is a standard 80-wires on 40-pin headers cable suitable for high speed drives. The additional wires are connected to the existing about 5 grounds inside the header so that a ground is placed between each signal and the next one.
Many vendors can supply them, but you need to be careful when installing them -- unlike most Mac cables, Brand-X cables may not be keyed, so installing them upside down is a possibility. Rounded cables are also available -- the best ones use twisted-pair construction.
You can buy a used original part on eBay.

Help With Hard Drive Problem

So I'm setting up my new computer and am having a problem. When I start it up it goes through the bios and whatnot. But, if I have the hard drive hooked up, the system will go to a black screen and stay there. I've tried it as the master to the CD-Rom and vice versa. Both ways stall as described. I can boot up the CD-Rom when it's by itself, but not with the HD hooked up. The weirdest thing is that the bios menu sees the hard drive and everythings. So I'm stumped. Please help.
EDIT: Computer stats below. Also not that the CD-rom and hard drive are on the same IDE cable.

Quote from: Maesus on 10-August-07, 16:00:27
the HDD is blank right?
Have you changed the boot sequence?
The hard drive is not blank, no. I've thought about that, but don't have a way of erasing it until tomorrow or the next day. I wasn't sure if that would really make a difference though. The main reason I'm not sure about that is the fact that it won't boot the CD-Rom when the hard drive is plugged in. Even if I tell it to only boot from the CD, it still goes to the same blank screen if I try it with the HD plugged in. As I said before, it will boot from CD if the hard drive is not present. I find it really weird that I can tell it to only boot from the CD-Rom and it still freezes with the HD present.

Removing my old hard drive

my power mac g4 finally died after the better part of a decade. i had an older model with the tower and the huge monitor and one day it didnt turn on. i brought it 2 an apple store 2 try 2 have the contents of my hard drive transferred 2 my new computer. but when they tried my hard drive kept failing. they said it was a bad hard drive. now i want 2 sell the computer but i want 2 physically remove the hard drive 1st. you know 4 security reasons and such. could you please explain 2 me exactly where the hard drive is located in the tower and how 2 properly remove it (im on the art side not so much the technical side so as detailed an explanation as you can give me would be a great help). thanks

Hi! You can find an installation video HERE. Looking at it will familiarize you with the inside of your computer. A Sawtooth (early G4) has the HD mounted in the bottom of the case (other models may vary in HD location). One screw holds the carrier in place with its hard drive attached. Remove the ide cable and the power connector and then take the screw out and remove the carrier. Once the carrier is out you can remove the hard drive from the carrier. It's a 2 minute job. Tom

Is a hard drive faster on a shorter IDE cable?

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for