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How can a 40-pin cable plug into an 80-pin mobo connector? The HD that shipped with the Gateway is a 40-pin EIDE (a WD 80GB 7200RPM), 100 MB/s using Mode 5 Ultra ATA.
The original cables had 40 pin connectors and 40 pin cables. However, they had trouble when you tried to run the controllers at high speeds, I'm not sure what the exact problem was, but I think it had something to do with interference from one wire to another.
Nornally, you'd solve that type of problem by shielding the cable -- putting a metal shield around it -- but shielding the invdividual wires of a ribbon cable isn't practical.
So, instead, they just put an extra wire in between. So the 40-pin connectors are still used, but now they're used on an 80 wire cable. Alternating wires are used, with the unused wires in between to act as "shields".
So for the best performance, you want to use an 80-wire cable with a 40-pin connector, and not a 40 wire cable. If that makes any sense?
Two HDs, on the same IDE channel; boot drive is master.
The controller can only send data back and forth between once device at a time on an IDE channel. So if you try to access them both at the same time (for example, copying a file from one to the other) the system will have to alternate between the two, rather than reading from one at the same time as writing to the other. There are times when this speed difference is noticible -- especially when using sofware mirroring or RAID. But, if you rarely try to access them simultaneously, it shouldn't matter.
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