Need advice on hard drives

[RobUK]

Now, i have a udma33 mobo and am getting a 20gb hard drive that uses udma66 now i know that it won't run at udma66 speed, but do i still need the udma66 cable to interface it with my mobo or will a standard ide cable do??

Also my other machine has a UDMA66 mobo and the 30gb hard drive i am getting is ATA100, now i know that this mobo won't run at 100 but do i need the ata100 cable or can i use the udma66 cable which came with the mobo?

IS there a difference between UDMA and ATA??

Thanx

RobUK

[Fingers]

You don't need an ATA/UDMA-66 cable for the new ATA-66 hdd if the mobo is only ATA-33 capable.

ATA-66 and ATA-100 use the same cable, the improvements that allow for the ATA-100 standard are in the hard drive, and a higher standard for circuit layout on the motherboard.

ATA is more like a standard for device attachement, and UDMA is more like a protocol that allows for high speed transfers, but the terms ATA and UDMA are kind of interchangeable these days.

[Roy]

www.whatis.com (http://www.whatis.com) is a good place to help decipher these "alphabet soup" terms.