Dell Sucks even more

Further evidence of how Dells are built down to a price: I noticed that the drives on the IDE1 interface werre running slower than those on IDE0:

Notice the number after UDMA in the last two lines. Hmmm, thinks I, what if Dell have opted to save a few cents by having a 40-pin cable instead of an 80-pin cable. The 80-pin cable is required for ATA 66 and above, but if you're only ever going to have CD drives on IDE1 because you've rigged the drive bays to be non-standard, maybe you can save a few cents by going for the cheaper cable.

So, I shutdown the case, open it up and have a quick look at the cables. What do I see? Indeed, Dell have specced even the cables down to a price!

Open up the Toolbox Of Tricks And Useful Bits and put in an 80-pin cable. Startup.

All well and good. Well, not quite. Before the brain transplant it was:

Notice that UDMA(100). Hmmm, the Dell's IDE channels are 33% slower than the piece of crap VIA motherboard I resurrected with a soldering iron! (And it's spent the last 2.5 years as the webserver and mailserver you've used whenever you've seen this site or sent me email. It's also been my primary workstation for all that time. I think that was a successful repair.)

Hmm, time to rummage in the parts bin for an IDE/133 card. Not got one. Bugger. Will have to shoot off down to Wanchai to pick one up just before Crazy Hour in Carnegies...

SOMETIME LATER...

Arr! Wahey Mateys! What?! It's not talk like a pirate day yet? Bugger.

Anyway, where were we? Oh yeah I need to do complicated sysadmin stuff after a few pints. No worries. About the only real danger is static electricity and I'm all in natural fibres and on wooden floors. I'll just earth myself to the parrot ZOT! SQUAWK! and we're ok.

PIECES OF SEVEN!

Damn parroty errors.

Well, another lesson in Dell thrift — the IDE cables are precisely measured to only go from the disks to the IDE connectors on the motherboard. You need to get new cables to connect them to a PCI board. Now *that* idea must have cost more to arrive at than it saved in production.

But it was all to naught, as the Dell refuses to boot from a non motherboard-connected disk, thanks to the cut down BIOS with no real options to choose from. Never buy a Dell. They're just complete crap.

So, at the end of it all, this is what I have:

For non-linux geeks, that means everything is chugging away at ATA-66 apart from hda, which is older and slower anyway.