Re: [sheflug] [OT] Frying hard disk with wrong cable?

[Marc Kelly <marc [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,
> Just a quicky question: if I have a hard drive that doesn't support UDMA-66
> and I plug it into a IDE controller with an 80-wire cable which does
> support UDMA-66, am I likely to kill the hard drive?

It shouldn't, as they will auto-negotiate which protocol to support and
go to the common mode. The worst case will be the controller tries to do
 -66 mode the drive says no and they drop down. Physical killing of the
disk shouldn't ever happen. I happily have a -33 drive in a -133
interface via a UDMA cable currently as my main system disk on a server.

> This is the second time I've had this happen with UDMA-66, the first time
> being years ago with an old hard disk (so I assumed the disk just went 
> really bad, rather than thinking it could be i/f issues).

I have had the motherboard's controller go bad on a board before, and
generally trash drives into corrupt states over time, but changed
motherboard and reformatted and the drives were fine.


-- 
/\/\arc Kelly
..Just your average physicist trying to get by in a world full of normal
people...

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