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If it was a scavenged system, I'd be apt to believe you, but a new build like this, you almost certainly would use new ribbon cables. In bulk, the ribbon is abo
by Sanddancer 11y ago
If it was a scavenged system, I'd be apt to believe you, but a new build like this, you almost certainly would use new ribbon cables. In bulk, the ribbon is about fifty cents a foot, so reusing old parts wouldn't be worth the trouble of having to troubleshoot problems down the road.
- logfromblammo 11y agoYou may have missed my sarcasm. You can easily see from the pictures that the ribbon cables are different widths. It looks like every ribbon connects a PCB to a connector on the backplane, most of them D-subs. The photo of the backplanes as installed show that most of the connectors aren't even being used. By coincidence, the large-sized cables have 40 conductors. The medium ones have 25 or 26, and the small ones have 15 or 16. Those are all standard sizes for ribbon cable, and you can likely buy new cables of the correct sizes off the shelf for less than $10 each, or make them yourself at 20% the price or less. In comparison to the overall cost of engineering the box, the ribbon cables are just a drop in the well. Nevertheless, about 12 of the ribbon cables in the box could theoretically be replaced by old PATA cables and 35 million people would still never know. The potential problems would be that some ATA cables block pin 20 as a mechanical key, they would be longer than strictly necessary, and ribbon cables are obnoxiously effective antennas. The 40-pin ribbon cables as installed could almost certainly be used as very short PATA cable replacements, with a little mechanical modification of the connectors.