this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2025
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That is an IDE cable, the standard for consumer-grade drives before SATA came along.
Sometimes you can find such cables with three connectors, one at one end, two at the other. And sometimes, a few wires are flipped over between those two connectors.
One IDE cable could host two harddisks, and most IDE harddisks had jumpers to set them to be drive 0 or 1. With a straight cable, you had to jumper them properly, with the partially twisted cable, you set both identical, I.e. you left them both as device 0.
The cable with the twist is a floppy drive cable, not IDE.
You can twist the IDE cable to switch the M/S configuration, too. It is not limited to the Shugart bus. But I have to admit it was more common there.
This functionality was implemented with a single cable select wire which is connected or open. I don't see how a twist would work electrically.
Yes, there is definitely the "cable select" method with pin 28. Maybe instead of cutting it, they swapped it with a GND pin or something?