Jumper settings?

[Mrious_be]

Hi Everyone

It looks pretty clear to me, but since i'll have to do the building in all by myself, i wanted to be sure and ask here.
I think i should go with the first one (i never seen that the jumpers had no connector as Master??).



Thx again

[Epaminondas]

Mrious_be,


Western Digital hard drives are unique in my experience in recommending jumper settings as follows:

Single hard drive:  "Cable Select" (this may involve no jumper at all depending on the drive).  Other brands of hard drive are usually configured as "master" in this most basic configuration.
Master of two hard drives:  "Master"
Slave of two hard drives: "Slave"

I do not fully understand the concept of "Cable Select." I understand that it is a technology that is supposed to allow you to connect any one or two ATA devices - say a hard drive alone or a hard drive and a CD drive - on a single  ribbon IDE cable and you do not have to concern yourself with master and slave settings - this is all is done for you automatically.  But all the technology - hard drive, ribbon cable, and CD - must cooperate.  

But it is apparently not really quite that simple in practice.

Seems like a solution in search of a problem - most of us can handle slave and master jumpers well enough as they are.


I have a WD 80 GB /8 MB cache 7200 RPM IDE hard drive.  

I have just jumpered it to  "cable select" when running it alone on the cable.

When with another drive, I either set both to "cable select," or one to master and one to slave - I have seen both configurations recommended.  I cannot tell any difference in these configurations, and I suspect that it may not really matter.

It all seems to be pretty forgiving.


If you want official specifics you might wander around the Western Digital support site at:

http://support.wdc.com/


Or just Google "Western Digital Cable Select."

I just did so and came up with:

http://www.segcomp.com/WD1200BB.html

Which seems to aded the fourth possibility of "neutral" jumpering - my head is spinning - something I do not recollect seeing mentioned when I set up my drive (a different WD drive model).


Final thoughts - Western Digitals do indeed have nonstandard nonuniversal instructions for set-up compared to other drives.  Their efforts at simplifying jumper settings seem to have just complicated the whole matter. I would just go with the instructions you have with your particular drive and not worry about it.  If that does not work - you might try try "cable select."  If that does not work, you might try "master."  

If there is a problem at that point, something else is likely going wrong.  For example, you might want to make sure you are using an 80-wire IDE cable, not the 40-wire cable that may have come with earlier Macs.  Disc drivers may also be an issue.

And, of course -

Don't forget to back-up.


Regards,

Epaminondas

[Mrious_be]

Woooow, thx Epaminondas

I have to look into this "Cable select" option and going to check that url to WD now

Thx

[Mrious_be]

The drive seems to be set as "cable select" standard, so i'll try that first.
I will use a external firewire drive from work to back up fast, so that won't be a problem, it's all been taken care off already, hehehe

[Steve_J]

I was just getting ready to post a request for info on how to set up and format a Western Digital EIDE drive when I saw this post.

I already have an ATA/IDE drive in my "beige" G3 which I'm using as a system drive. Can I just plug the cables into this one or do I need to set the jumpers on the new one as a slave? Do I need to redo the jumpers on the old one?  And what about setting it up as a Mac drive, do I need to format and if I do, with what?

I don't know what "cable select" is all about. I haven't felt this ignorant in a long time.

[kelly]

Cable Select means it's made Master or Slave by it's connection on the IDE Cable.

If it's at the end connector it's the Master, the other one Slave.

Don't know what your original is set to.

Don't know if the Beige executes Cable Select well.

Experiment. It won't hurt it. It just probably won't see both or not Boot.

Chances are good it's come Formatted for PCs.

Just use Drive Setup in your Utilites Folder to Format it.

Partition it if you want.

[Mrious_be]

Kelly said it all, hehehe