Hi can any on please answer these queries.

1 - you can repl the ide cable on the xbox and use an ata 100 cable.

does this have any effect on speeding up the gameplay or is it only useful for those playing games from their HD.?

2 - can u get replacement dvd roms fro the xbox? as the yellow connector at back seem different to most dvd rom.

I saw someone who did & said it was fast (Don't know how they calculated speed). But I have a tech issue with this, first of all, the HD has to have that speed turned on & the XBox is probably not even setup to handle that much speed due to the heat issues, but maybe someone can explain it better.

I replaced my ide cable with an ata 100 cable and it did speed things up a little. It was noticable in some games but not spectacular. It was most noticable in Dead or Alive and Project Gotham where selecting a character or car takes a while before it is displayed. It still took some time, but just not as much.

I've since upgraded my hard drive to a 120 GB 7200 RPM which takes better advantage of the ata 100 cable and things are even faster now. My FTP speeds between my XBox and PC almost doubled, although it probably has more to do with the drive than the cable.

As a side note, some ATA 100 cables have one wire cut (which is really what the spec calls for). These cables will not work. You have to use one with no wires cut, which actually seems to be more common, despite the spec stating otherwise.

Odd, but the maxtor drives I see at the store are all ata 133-- not ata 100.....this makes sense because the old ones were topped at ata66.

would anyone advise round ata cables for cooling issues

The flat cable doesn't really get in the way of cooling in the XBox since most of it is laying on top of the DVD drive and hard drive. Only a little bit (right below the DVD drive) is in the motherboard area. But there are no critical components over there anyway. The CPU, video chip, etc. are no where near the cable.

Also, since the IDE cable has to run on top of the DVD and hard drives, I don't think the top cover of the XBox would even close with a thick round cable.

Can someone please quantify what sort of time / speed improvement you get if you swap the cable.

I dont think there can be any really since the boxes were made before ata100 came out?

It was reported that an IDE cable upgrade yielded no better results. Here is a link to the article.

http://166.88.8.240/resources/ATA_Cable/

I have a seagate 160gig HD 7200rpm....

I was running it with standard ata33 cable and it seemed slow to boot games from the HD.

I replaced it with 80 wire ata100 cable and I immediately saw that their is noticeable improvement in both booting up to EvoX and launching games.