i've got a bag full of ide cables and floppy cables, and found that some only have a single tiny wire inside, while others have like 5 of the same wire.
i ended up taking a single ide cable apart and using only as many wires as i needed by splitting it up into groupings and sticking them into their own ide plugs. i used 12 wires for each of my gpwiz's, 40 for my minipac, and another 10 for the second plug on my minipac. i had plenty to spare too. oh, and it was tedious to split them apart and strip them and crimp them into molex plugs, but it only took a couple hours and now it works perfectly, cept my trackball needs it's axis switched.