IDE cables... Rounded vs flat

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pbXassassinX1524

[H]ard|Gawd
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I have been reading a lot of articles on RAID and SATA and flat and rounded cables. It seems like most places seem to do nothing but show bad things about rounded cables, and that even though they are less restricting and look cleaner they are way worse for data transaction. Now I have a rounded IDE cable on my HDD and when i ran the seatools diagnostic... the cable test didn't come up with any errors or anything. So whats you opinion on the IDE cable.... and would it be worth it to me just purely for reliability to switch to SATA? At that point I would also probably run a RAID 0 config too.
 
I used to round all of my IDE cables, but then I had a couple of drives start freaking out on me. I switched the cables back to normal ones and the drives worked fine. Ever since, I have not used rounded cables on ATA66 (or higher) drives. Since then, Ihave read numerous areticles explaining how the grounding wires (40 out of the 80 pins) are extremely crucial to inhibiting noise.

I still use rounded cables for my other IDE/floppy devices and have never had any issues.
 
its not that "round" cables are naturally inferior, its that there where more poorly made round cables out there, there are high quality round cables, this applies equally to SCSI and IDE, but SCSI is a terminated (reflections from the end of the cable are dealt with, reducing "noise") whereas IDE (Parallel ATA\ATAPI) isnt.

The problems arise when you have higher speeds
(in both IDE & SCSI) or additional interfaces (bridge card, converters ect) complex configurations, poor routing, other sources of EMFields or just devices that dont want to play well together and crappy cables

Serial ATA has been designed to take the transfer speed beyond where it currently is, and greatly improves data transfer fidelity

some links (some you may have already read)
SATA and the 7 Deadly Sins of Parallel ATA
ATA Not So Frequently Asked Questions
IDE Fancy Leads the terrible truth
RD3XP Gladiator super shielded round cable
RD3XP review with suprising results
Noise Durability Test click on photos for animated charts
Thermoplastic Olefin (TPO) & Teflon Flat cables (ommited from the above test) the typical high quality cable supplied with a good RAID card in PATA

when it comes to PATA, the shorter the cable the better
a single beats a master slave, and high quality plastic (TPO) is far better than the normal PVC, when it come to roundcables, sheilding, how the ground wires are interlayed (and for SCSI weaving) are what contributes to a High Quality cable

and for SCSI especially, when you buy a premade External RAID Chassis that employs SCA (a backplane the drive plugs into) the internal and external cabling and the signal reliability has all been addressed and tested for the transfer speeds its rated for, when you try to cobble together a similar setup (or employ converters) the same level of reliability becomes more problomatic, same for using IDE swap trays, every time you add an extra interface there can be issues, sometimes enough to cause corruption, sometimes just reducing perfromance (since both SCSI and ATA use CRC and resend data that is screwed up, and that translates into less throughput, effectively adding to the 'overhead")
 
The IDE specs were drawn up to use a ribbon cable. IDE was never designed to be external, so round cables weren't really an issue that needed to be dealt with. IDE was designed with to work with the characteristics of ribbon cables. Therefore, if the characteristics of a rounded cable are different enough from ribbon cables then you will have problems. If your system is running fine and you haven't noticed any data errors then you should be fine with rounded cables. However, if you are concerned with data integrity than you stay in spec and use ribbon cables.
 
Ribbon cables can look as neat or neater than the best rounded cable job. If you carefully fold the ribbon at 45 or 90 degree angles, you can usually route them out of the way very cleanly. Fold across a metal ruler for a crisp fold.
 
It still doesn't have the price/performance ratio that parallel ATA drives enjoy (due to economies of scale mostly), but yes, your next drive should probably be Serial ATA.
 
Originally posted by pbXassassinX1524
okay, so serial ATA... definilty the way to go from now on?
Click to expand...

Yes, unless you can pick up PATA drives for really cheap.
 
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