What ribbon cable should I get for my 3rd drive?

Question

Hi, I just installed my 3rd hard disk drive in my 933MHZ(was 733) QuickSilver G4.
I recently emailed a vendor asking:
"Hello, I have a Mac 733 Quick Silver computer and I just installed my
third hard disk drive. I need a 40 pin 4(for later) drive scsi ribbon
cable. Can you help me? THANKS!
Darren"
His response:
"Darren, Two drives is the most you can get with standard IDE.
Dave"
Did I ask for the wrong cable. From what I understand the QuickSilver can accomodate up to 4 internal drives. I would prefer to install a cable: 5 connector 4 drive than install a card.
The cable that I am using now for the 2 drives is APPLE P/N 590-2253 REV A
FOXCONN P/N FC80C17-00 K 0115. On the white lable is 080-0003-192 FOXCONN.
TIA

Answer 1

Hi
Unlike SCSI, each IDE/ATA channel can only support a maximum of two devices, hence there isn't such a thing as a 5 connector 4 drive IDE ribbon cable. The options for a third ATA drive are:
1. Mount it in the bay intended for a Zip drive (beneath the optical drive). Apple don't recommend this though due to possible heat issues and the bus is slower, being ATA/33 rather than ATA/66, which may affect performance.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=58200
2. Mount it in an external firewire enclosure which can be bought separately (driveless).
3. Buy a Mac compatible PCI card containing another ATA controller. These typically have two channels, each channel supporting two drives, for four drives in total.
4. Replace the ATA drive with a SATA drive and buy a Mac compatible PCI card containing a SATA controller. These typically have two channels, each channel supporting one drive, for two drives in total. They can be used in conjunction with the two ATA drives on the inbuilt ATA controller though, and four channel versions are available supporting four drives.