Question

Your mother wants to purchase a large hard drive for her computer and asks you to see what type of drive interface she has. Her computer has a gray ribbon cable that encases 40 pins what type of drive does she have

Answer 1

Answer: IDE Hard Drive

Explanation:

A gray ribbon that encases forty pins is a IDE cable, used to connect IDE devices to the computer.

IDE Cables come in two different variants, 34-pin connector, which is normally connected to floppy disks, and the 40-pin, which is used to connect the Hard Drive and Optical Drives.

There are different pin counts, but mainly you would want to know the 34-pin and 40-pin IDE Cables.

A IDE hard drive is basically the same as a PATA Hard Drive.