heres one that im banging my head over 80wire or 40wire ide for pioneer 109 ?!?!

[VIPER_1069]

I recently had an 80wire cable give up on me which just happened to be the one connected directly from the mboard to the pioneer 109 ... searching through my box of spare parts i realised i only had a spare 40wire ide cable to use.

My question is ... is it really Necessary to have an 80wire cable for running the pioneer 109 with or does it matter as the 40wire seems to be doing just fine reading at max speed and writing at max speeds !?

Will it be worth me wasting a few £/$'s to get an 80wire cable or is it just a case of IF IT AIN'T broke why fix it ?!

Reading around the various burning forums they say 80wire is a must have for the 109 as it will not work !?, odd really as mine seems to be performing the same lol

Note here i have just the 109 and my liteon on the second IDE channel from the mboard

[LTR12101B]

With an 80 wire and later firmware, the 109 will do Ultra DMA mode 4 (ATA-66) - without that, it will only do UDMA 2 (ATA-33).

It seems that it shows better buffer stability when UDMA4 is possible.


Just depends, I now have this drive, and I'd recommend the 80 wire for any drive that can use > ATA-33, even if it's not 100% dependent on that level of throughput.