I am interesting in getting a primary/slave cable for my motherboard and harddisk drives or CD-drives. I don't know what the difference between ATA and 100/133 stuff is. There are cables on pricewatch.com that are "HDD" cables. Would those work for my cdrom drives? Would it work in a vice versa situation?

There are two types of IDE cable, 40 way and 80 way. 40 way is good for speeds up to ATA33. Above that you need an 80 way cable. Moder hard diskk are ATA 100 or ATA 133. You will also see mentioned UDMA100 or USMA133. Ultra Direct Memory Access is a specification withing the ATA standard. There are flat cables and round cables. Either will work but the round cables have screening included which is supposed to increase reliability of high speed data. Stuart

If you're just gonna get the basic "ribbon" cable, I'd buy it locally. There are 40 wire cables for use with optical drives & older hard drives (ATA33 & older), & 80 wire cables for ATA66 & higher (the 80 wire cable also works with older drives). They both use the same connectors, but the 80 wire cables usually have color coded plugs. There are also round cables...they're more expensive than ribbon cables...if these are the type you're looking for, you might do better shopping online. I don't think there's any real advantage to them, other than they keep things a little less cluttered inside the case...& that might allow for better airflow, therefore, better cooling. The ATA numbers (ATA33, ATA66, ATA100, ATA133) refer to bandwidth or data transfer rates, expressed in megabytes/sec (mb/s). So you have 33 mb/s, 66 mb/s, etc. These numbers, like DDR memory numbers (PC2100, PC2700, etc), are representative of theoretical maximums, rather than the max values you're likely to encounter in real life. But higher numbers are what people see, & that's what they want...they think they "need" it...higher means faster, right? Oooops, I'm going off an a rant...lol.