My friend has installed into his comp two hard drives and he has the blue end of the IDE cable connected to his master hard disk, the middle connector to his slave HD, and the the last into his mobo. Does this blue end of the cable HAVE to go into the mobo? He IS experiencing strange problems (such as a USB mass storage drive assignment problem, the mysterious cessation of his Nero functionality, and on and on) and his comically complex setup is very suspect. So, again, would this IDE cable orientation be a problem?

BTW: Forgive me if this has been addressed; I searched google for 20 minutes before giving up on any info regarding WHY blue end must go to mobo and what the consequences of doing it the other way around would be.

no issues what so ever would be experienced.

Generally youll notice the one end port is further away from the other 2. The furthest one away is usually the end people plug into the mother board because of cable length limits. But other than that no

No offense intended to chookman, but from my previous experience with IDE cables, it actually can matter.

For the older 40-conductor IDE cables, it didn't matter at all. But typically, those IDE cables have all black connectors, and required that you manually set each IDE device to master or slave. These cables did not support "Cable Select" mode.

For the 80-conductor IDE cables that are meant to support UDMA33 and above speeds, the connectors are typically blue, black, and gray. The blue connector is intended to go to the motherboard, the gray to the device intended to be the slave, and the black to the device intended to be the master. These cables support the "Cable Select" mode.

If your devices are set to Cable Select you must use the connectors as stated above. Cable Select will not work unless the blue connector is plugged into the motherboard.

Technically, if you use the black connector on the motherboard and the devices on blue and gray, it will theoretically work but you must individually and manually set each device to Master and Slave, you cannot use Cable Select.

The reason behind this is that to do cable select, the cable blocks one signal from the motherboard from traveling to the black connector. If you look closely at the ribbon cable, there is a notch in one wire in between the gray and black connectors. The wire that is interrupted is the cable select wire. If you plug the black connector into the motherboard instead of the blue, the cable select wire is blocked before BOTH connectors that are connecting to the devices, and both devices will try to become Master if they are set to Cable Select.

I've switched it around just because it was easier to connect drives and worked fine. This was in the last few years or so when I had 2 IDE CD/DVD drives.

Interesting read SomeJoe7777, Ive never ran into this problem because ive never used cable select in my life. Ive always prefered the manual selection, and as i stated before generally the end that should go into the motherboard for cable select is positioned better for that reason ive pretty much always used that end for motherboard connection

When I have an 80-conductor cable, I almost always use cable select because I can move devices around in the case and from one IDE channel to another and not have to move any jumpers.

I have run into one or two devices that refused to play nice with cable select, but they were CD/DVD drives. All the hard drives I've ever used ran fine on cable select, so long as the 80-conductor cable was used.