Quote:
what is the potential drawback of doing it backwards?


As Mark says, it's about signal termination. It's the same reason that SCSI has termination resistors. Without a drive at the end of the cable to soak up the signals, you'll get reflections, which can mess things up.

Imagine that you have a single disk in the middle of the cable -- you send it a request, which is reflected back from the end of the cable. Your reflected request could end up interfering with the response data, if the drive chooses to respond at just the wrong moment. There's no collision detection in IDE...

This becomes a particular problem when you're attempting to communicate over long distances, or at high speed, where the tolerances are tighter.

In the case of the empeg, the IDE cable is short, and they're only ATA33/66 disks, so the speed's not an issue.

So, for the empeg, it won't matter, but you're still running out-of-spec...
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-- roger