IDE cable - proprietary?

I have a compaq deskpro EN, Pentium III 733 mhz and the IDE cables
have a break in one of the wires about 1/8" long near the blue
connector. Does anyone know why the cable is designed like this? I
want to replace the primary cable with one that has a middle connector
for a slave drive. Do I need a special compaq cable?

That's a cable select type of cable. It expects any drives connected to it to
have a jumper placed on the CS jumper pins. The drive most distant from the
motherboard is the master and the drive attached to the middle connector is a
slave in the cable select scheme of things. These cables have become
increasingly popular compared to the other type which require explicit master
and slave jumper setttings. Most every name brand uses cable select cables...
Ben Myers

On Sun, 4 May 2008 17:34:51 -0700 (PDT), Paul wrote:

I have a compaq deskpro EN, Pentium III 733 mhz and the IDE cables
have a break in one of the wires about 1/8" long near the blue
connector. Does anyone know why the cable is designed like this? I
want to replace the primary cable with one that has a middle connector
for a slave drive. Do I need a special compaq cable?