Hard drive and CD rom Cables.

are these the same cables, sound liek an idiot but im confused.

if your cables look like this...
http://www.vgmusic.com/faq/gallery/plugs/p-IDE.jpg
they both run ata-133 and use the same cables yes

however, you can get sata hard drives which run on cables like these...
http://www.cs-electronics.com/images...%20Cable-1.jpg
this clearly isn't compatible with standard ATAPI ide drives

thank you very much for clearing that up :)

Wellllll, I'm not an expert, but there can be differences between the two yes.
You can get 40-conductor or 80-conductor cables.
The ATA/ATAPI-4 or ATA/ATAPI-5 (can't remember which one) UDMA requirements specify that an 80-Conductor IDE is mandatory, blah blah blah.

Basically, CD Drives usually use 40-conductor cables, whereas hard drives use 80-conductor ones, although you can use 80-conductor cables with CD drives.
80 cable conductors are supposed to reduce noise and when noise is reduced transfer rates are increased as the drive does not have to resend data twice. 40-conductor cables were designed for transfer speeds of 5MB/s.

Hope this helps

Just found a nice linky:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/id...Cable80-c.html
with a nice image showing the difference between the two:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/id...4wires4080.jpg