So you have just purchased a new hard drive or DVD burner and open the box. Along with the drive itself, you see a small plastic bag containing 4 screws. Screws are helpful; you have seen them before and know what to do with them, but as you pull more items from the box, you notice this ribbon cable. If this is your first upgrade, you probably don’t know a lot about these types of cables.

Here's what you connect the IDE cable to on a CD/DVD drive

And here's a similar view of the connectors on the back of a hard disk drive

Some info about this cable

First of all, this particular ribbon cable is called an IDE conductor cable. A lot of new hard drives no longer use this type of cable. If the box reads SATA, then you will have a different type of cable. Since there are still many older systems out there that do not support SATA, IDE (or ATA) drives are still being manufactured. Most of the DVD-ROM drives continue to use the IDE cable as well.

Are there different kinds of IDE cables?

IDE cables are classified according to the number of conductors (wires ) used. 40-conductor cables have (you guessed it!) 40 wires. The 40-conductor IDE cables were eventually replaced by 80-conductor cables, which are less susceptible to electrical interference. There is a slight problem with this, however. Although there are twice as many wires, the 80-conductor cable has the same number of sockets in its connector as the 40-conductor cable. The extra 40 wires in the 80-conductor IDE cable are ground wires. This helps to prevent signal leakage, thereby increasing data integrity and system stability.

A picture of an 80-conductor (left) and a 40-conductor (right) IDE cable

So which cable am I supposed to use? The new one that came in the box, or the one already in my PC?

In most cases, it really doesn’t matter which one you use, but it is generally considered good practice to use the new one. By doing this, you are keeping your parts as new as possible while ensuring maximum compatability. Alternatively, you could just ditch them all and go with rounded IDE cables.