Sata 3 Cables

It could also have something to do with cable pairing or magnetic insulation. The III cable could have two of the conductors together or differently shielded or a shielding tuned to a different frequency.

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GeneO said:

seekermeister said:

Going somewhat off in a tangent, I found some SATA III cables which are round, rather than the typical flat shape. Is there any reason that these would be better or worse?

They aren't as flexible. That might be important for your cable management.

That might be true for internal cables, but what I was thinking of was my external cables. I don't know that round would be any better, except that the flat ones tend to be a bit annoying in when they won't twist the way that I want very easily.

pparks1 said:

seekermeister said:

EDIT: Still, this illustrates something that I have asked about previously, regarding whether a SATA III drive is better than SATA II or not. All the responses that I got seemed to brush it off as merely being hype, or too negligible to be worth noting. That may be true for someone accustomed to SSDs, but not for someone such as myself that is specifically interested in hard drives. The difference between your drive and mine is definitely worth paying a little more for. Had I seen this previously, I would not have opted for that SATA II drive.

Of course, you must take into account the motherboard, the drivers, the amount of cache on the drive, and the onboard SATA controllers themselves as well. It's quite possible, that the exact same physical drive used above, in your rig, might have scored more inline with where your SATA 3.0Gbps drive falls. I think real world measurable differences between SATA 3.0Gbps and SATA 6.0Gbps mechanical hard drives is just about non-existent. A few MB/s in a benchmark really won't amount to anything in real world usage.

And the drive's cache, number of platters, improvements in firmware, etc, etc.
I have both. I agree.

seekermeister said:

GeneO said:

seekermeister said:

Going somewhat off in a tangent, I found some SATA III cables which are round, rather than the typical flat shape. Is there any reason that these would be better or worse?

They aren't as flexible. That might be important for your cable management.

That might be true for internal cables, but what I was thinking of was my external cables. I don't know that round would be any better, except that the flat ones tend to be a bit annoying in when they won't twist the way that I want very easily.

You mean eSATA cables? I have a round one, it works fine, but also have the same difficulty - you still have resistance to twisting the orientation. The flat cables can fold on themselves a little better.

Well, the twisting and folding (especially the folding) change the resistance internally and affect the capacity for throughput. The more it deviates from standard the more resends and failures it will have to have for a transmission

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kool1zero said:

Well, the twisting and folding (especially the folding) change the resistance internally and affect the capacity for throughput. The more it deviates from standard the more resends and failures it will have to have for a transmission

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How would you explain that? Copper is pretty malleable/flexible. Bending it repeatedly will "work harden" it, but I understand the change in resistance is very small, and usually you don't bend it repeatedly.

I think that the amount that a bend might effect throughput would depend on the amount of bending imparted on the cable. I doubt that a bend as would normally be necessary, would have any effect, but if that angle of bend became acute, it might.

seekermeister said:

I think that the amount that a bend might effect throughput would depend on the amount of bending imparted on the cable. I doubt that a bend as would normally be necessary, would have any effect, but if that angle of bend became acute, it might.

Very much doubt it, lets stick to known facts and not speculation. For one thing, I am sure these cables are speced with headroom to take considerations like that into account. The acceptance criteria for a SATA II, for example, is a 6dB loss at 4800 MHz (1800 MHZ above the rated transfer speed).

CompTia specifies that you should not bend a cable a bend to a radius of less than three cable widths of sharpness or it will begin to affect throughput.

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