How can you tell the transfer speed of an IDE cable? I am asking because when I got this PC, the HDD was on the 2ndary IDE channel, and the CD-RW was on the primary, not liking how it was setup, I just popped off the CD-RW's IDE cable and connected it tot he HDD and connected the cable that was on the HDD to the CD-ROM, I know optical drives run slwoer than harddrives do, so I was wondering if the same is true for the cables?

All you gotta do is just set the jumper in the back of the HD and CD-RW, so the comp can detect HD as primary and CD-RW as secondary.

I guess i phrased my question wrong, but anyways, what I was asking is if IDE cables have different transfer rate? my harddrive is ATAT133, I get a 37MB/s transfer on my HDD, but what I was asking is, that if cables have anything to do with it, because my HDD and CD-ROM drive were on 2 seperate IDE cables, at the time, it was slightly mis-configured as the HDD was on the secondary IDE interface, and the CD_RW was on the primary interface, rather than taking the cables completly off I just swapped the connection (one from the cd-rw tot he hdd, one from the hdd to the cd-rw) and was wondering if that would have a performance effect? (IE: slow it down, due to the cable only supporting a certain speed).

The 80 wire cables have finer wire. For the most part they have color coded ends. The older 40 wire cables are coarser wires and no color coding. The 40 wire are only capable of 33MBs/sec. The color coding is as follows: Blue/MB, Grey/slave, Black/master. The black and grey master/slave orientation only comes into play if you are using CS. When setting jumpers to Master or Slave, you can connect to either connector. I recommend you NOT use CS.

Just to clarify, ATA133 is the interface. 133 MBs is the maximum throughput of the said interface. Other factors can reduce the throughput. In all 37MBs isn't bad.