Data Cables Using in PC

Here you can find Three/Two common Data Cable types inside your PC.

1.IDE Cable(To connect Hard Disk Drive, CD-ROM, CDRW, DVD etc.,).
2. Floppy Disk Drive Cable.
3. SATA - Cable(Serial-ATA Hard Disk Drive/Other SATA Drives)

And Externally, One may use USB(Universal Serial Buss) cables, Firewire Cables, Serial/Parallel Cables to connect External Modems/Printers/Scanners/Other Serial/Parallel devices.

Let us look about them how they appears to identify:

FLOPPY DISK CABLE:

It is a 34pin data cable and it marked with the red stripe indicates pin1 and you must connect that as it is. There might me a chance that you can connect this cable in reverse order, in such case please note that, when you first switched on PC, the LED(Light) will glow continiously. If so, turn off the system immediately and reverse and fix the data cable and re-start your PC again. According to 'Boot Priority' and 'Boots up Floopy Seek' settings in BIOS(Basic Input Output System), the system will check the status of FloppyDisk, and at that time, you can find it's LED will on for a while. "If you find Error 80 when you switch on the system means: there is fault in Floppy Disk/Cable/Power supply.

The easiest way to identify your Floppy disk cable is: It is twisted at one end. This cable is mainly used to connect 3.1/2'(Floppy connected with Pin Headder Connector) and 5.1/4' (Connected with Edge Connector) Drives. In the above picture is showing Pin-Headder Connector for 31/2' Floppy Disk Drive.

In latest/older PCs, if you find 5 connector twisted cable, understand that, it has two edge connectors and two pin-headder connectors to connect 31/2' or 51/4' Drives and one pin-headder connector is to be connected with Motherboard. (Observe the above picture carefully)

IDE CABLES(Hard Disk/CD-ROM/RW/DVD):

IDE stands for Integrated Device, (or Drive), Electronics. EIDE is a later standard of IDE. It stands for Enhanced Integrated Device, (or Drive), Electronics. EIDE is three to four times faster than the older IDE standard. The picture below shows how to connect an IDE cable to two drives. Using jumpers that are normally located on the back of a drive, the top drive should be made the "master" and the bottom drive should be made the "slave." The master drive is the primary drive. It is normally located at the end of a two connection IDE cable. The slave, or secondary drive, is connected to the IDE cable between the master drive and the motherboard IDE connection. Since data can not go to and from each drive at the same time, it is necessary to make one drive the master and the other drive the slave. IDE cables consist of either 40 individual wires or 80 individual wires. Ultra ATA/66 or later devices need the 80 wire cables to operate efficiently. Most of these wires are used to transfer data between the motherboard and the drives.

This picture shows IDE Cable connected to Two Drives(HDD/CD-ROM) with Motherboard.

SATA Cables:

Serial ATA or SATA is the newest version of the ATA interface. SATA claims to support all the traditional ATA functions but does it over an interface cable with only 7 wires (instead of the normal 40 wires for traditional parallel ATA interfaces).

SATA(SATA-1) Data Cable

SATA-2 Data Cable:

Soon after completing the SATA-1 specification the SATA "secret society" continues working and have joined forces with the Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) sub-committee of T10 to merge SATA and SAS. The result so far is yet another version of SATA known as SATA-2.

SATA-2 Data Cable

Precautions to use SATA1/SATA2 Cables:

• 
  DO NOT operate SATA devices outside of a sealed system unit. DO NOT operate SATA devices from a power supply that is not the system unit's power supply.
• DO NOT tie wrap SATA cables together. DO NOT put sharp bends in SATA cables.
• DO NOT route SATA cables near PATA cables.
• Avoid placing SATA devices close to each other such that the SATA cable connectors are close to each other.
• DO NOT operate a radio transmitter (such as a cell phone) near an exposed SATA cable or device.

MiniUSB Data Cable:
These are the cables used externally to connect your Digital Video/Imaging Devices to your PC to transfer the Data(Video).

Mini USB Connector

IEE-1394 Firewire Cables:

This is also an external Cable. FireWire is Apple Inc.'s brand name for the IEEE 1394 interface (although the 1394 standard also defines a backplane interface). It is also known as i.Link (Sony’s name). It is a personal computer (and digital audio/digital video) serial bus interface standard, offering high-speed communications and isochronous real-time data services. FireWire has replaced Parallel SCSI in many applications, due to lower implementation costs and a simplified, more adaptable cabling system. IEEE 1394 has been adopted as the High Definition Audio-Video Network Alliance (HANA) standard connection interface for A/V (audio/visual) component communication and control.

IEEE-1394 Firewire Cable

Beside them, there are some more little cables you can find inside the PC, they are Audio Cables connected from CD-Drives to Motherboards / to Sound Cards/Blasters.

IDE-Audio Cable

SB-Audio Cable