bought a new dvd writer that has a new ide cable (cant remember the exact amount but it has more ires in the ide)i have had problems with it and sony say i must use this cable as opposed to the old one i had in what i would like to know is what is the difference between this one and the older ones apart from more wires and if i put it in as suggested can i put an older drive as slave on the cable as well(are they backward compatible)

HI as far as i know it just has more wires for better data transfer. It is as you say backward compatibe, your other devices will work on it. For faster devices you must have the 80 wire cable.

Besides more wires (they are all ground, for better shielding), it is necessary to plug the blue connector into the motherboard (controller), the grey to the Slave and the black (end) to the Master. They are backward compatible.

This 80-wire IDE cable is necessary for using devices that use the Ultra-66 and above interfaces. Your hard drive must also use this type of cable to obtain the maximum transfer rate from your hard drive. I was shocked recently to see a new computer that someone had bought (made by Tiny) I think it was, and they had used a standard Ultra-33 cable for the hardrive that was Ultra-100, as a result, boot time was much longer and the drive was stuck with this limiting cable until it was replaced. James