Serial ATA Article – 3901 days old

[Sonny]

Great info on the new Serial ATA drives. Also included is why rounded cables are a no-no for flat cable replacement on IDE drives.

http://www.lostcircuits.com/advice/sata150/

[waldo]

DAMN thats a good article, thanks sonny

[Dramen]

Excellent read Sonny. Yeah, that bit about reducing the life of the hd with round cables is a bit disturbing. Wonder if anyone has some more info/links on this.
I've never encountered corrupted data because of my round cables, not even with my ghetto mods. But, how would I know that my hd is not being subjected to an early death?

[Jizzy]

Round cable is only really good for gamers who keep their machines for 6 months before replacing it with another big bad $4,000 computer. And of course, those gamers only care about how it looks, since they'll be reinstalling in 6 months anyway.

[Tuffie]

Good link Sonny,I had read that the rounded cables could be a problem,but the new one's that cost a mint, are supposed to have cured that.IA will be along on this one,we had a discussion about it before,remember Dramen?

[mont]

Yeah, cool article and i heard the same thing on round cables.

Thx Sonny

[AmStoned]

Total BS about the round cables inducing higher failure rates. I've read articles where round cabes gets the same transfer rate. Shit, I got round cable in both of my systems and CD burning is always good, whether it's CD to CD, or HD to CD.

And just 'cause dude came up w/ some technical mumble jumble he pulled from Seagate's website doesn't mean it's true. I mean, where's the actual proof? Did the guy actually do a extensive test on a pair of HDs in single and RAID 0, 1, 0+1 configuration using both conventional 80-pin flat ribbon and round cable for a period of maybe 6 to 12 months? No. So before he can give me some real world facts, shut that pie hole.

As we outlined in an earlier article, those design induced problems, that is, the trade-off between elimination of cross talk and avoidance of signal ringing are the reason for the strict designation of the individual connectors on any UATA ribbon cable as "board", "master" and "slave" that cannot be reversed without disturbing the balance and potentially damage the drive. Likewise, folding of the cables, rounded and spliced cables can be fashionable but one thing they are definitely not is electrically clean. This is why rounded cables will increase the failure rate of HDDs regardless of their esthetic value.

Wow, that was informative. Too bad I didn't read that before I bought 10 round cables, could've saved me a ton of money. Not.