What is the gauge of wire used in a typical commercial 40 pin IDE cable?
Electronic – Wire gauge of 40 pin IDE cable
gaugeribbon-cable
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DO NOT GO NEAR THESE LIMITS DO NOT GO NEAR THESE LIMITS DO NOT GO NEAR THESE LIMITS: -
So what should you use? I'd use this calculator - it seems to do the job: -
What you care about is called ampacity - Amperage Capacity. It is determined by the the heating limit of the wire carrying the current.
It has no dependancy on length.
IF you have 50 m of wire that is 1 \$ m\Omega \$ the and carries 100 Amps. the power loss along that 50 m is 10 W (0.001 * \$100^2\$) from \$I^2R\$. If you now double the wire length, the resistance doubles and the power loss doubles therefore the power loss per unit length stays the same.
What does matter is that the longer wire will drop more voltage across it (ESR - Equivalent series resistance) so you will loose headroom.
The way to look at it is that when you lengthen the wire, it's area also increases so it's ability to handle power also increases (more area to dump heat out of).
Best Answer
26 or 28 AWG for typical ribbon cables (like the one in the O.P. picture). Ribbons with bigger wires (smaller AWG) are more of a specialty. Here's a datasheet for your generic ribbon cable, which specifies the wire gauge (bottom of the page).
P.S. Of course, if one wire in the ribbon can't carry enough current, you could use several in parallel.