Dell Optiplex GX270 IDE Cable Needed

Ar wrote:
On 04/07/13 21:27, Pen wrote:

The Optiplex uses a standard IDE cable. The normal ones have
3 connectors for the 2 drives allowed by the interface. You
can use a 2 connector one if you have no interest in a
second drive or just put the CD on the 2nd one.

It's not recommended to put a CD drive on the same IDE cable as a hard
drive, the hard drive speed will slow down a LOT. Use that only if
desperate.

Note: *Do not* visit this site. It uses aggressive advertising. If you
want to read the page for yourself, use Firefox, load the page,
then have Task Manager ready, to kill Firefox. As soon as the popups
appear, kill Firefox. Restart Firefox, select "new session", to throw
away any references to the site.

In any case, here is the relevant quote.

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/id...ormance-c.html

"Independent Master/Slave Device Timing:

Hard disk controllers on modern systems support running the
master and slave device at different speeds, if one supports
faster transfer modes than the other. ---- [ Speed independent ]

Some systems, however, especially older ones, do not.

If you are using two devices with radically different maximum
transfer rates, and the chipset doesn't support independent
timing, you will slow down the faster device to the speed
of the slower one."

Your advice would have been appropriate more than ten years ago,
but now you have nothing to worry about. And you can test
this with HDtune if you want (benchmark your IDE drive, with or
without the CDROM connected on the same cable).

Paul

"Ar" wrote in message
...
On 04/07/13 21:27, Pen wrote:

The Optiplex uses a standard IDE cable. The normal ones have
3 connectors for the 2 drives allowed by the interface. You
can use a 2 connector one if you have no interest in a
second drive or just put the CD on the 2nd one.

It's not recommended to put a CD drive on the same IDE cable as a hard
drive, the hard drive speed will slow down a LOT. Use that only if
desperate.

Nonsense. Maybe true 12 years ago....

Chris

(OP)

As usual I made things more difficult than they really were.
A normal IDE cable did suffice, and I have the Optiflex running with
an IDE HDD and an IDE CD drive (which I think I will change to DVD.

Thanks for all the helps.

me