Why do people insist on using round IDE cables just because they look cool.??!!?? Doesnt anyone know why an IDE cable is made the way its made for a reason??
Cdrom cables only need 40 conductors to perform properly since there isnt 2way communication through the ide cable simultaneously, on the other hand, hard drive cables (if running 2 harddrives) requires 80 conductors since there is 2 way simultaneous data transfer.

The reason there are 80 pins is because there is an isolating ground wire between the data wires thus eliminating corruption and repeated data requesting.

I ask this - if the ATA industry designed these cables like this for a reason - then why is it so popular to crunch the hell out of the wires and group them all together in a single tube???

And the argument is ("I've been using round cables for ever and never noticed any performance changes")

Use of round cables on cdrom drives is a hard one to test since each cdrom drive has very different performances, but harddrives are a different story

has anyone ever tested a harddrive using both round and flat ribbon cables?? anyone ever notice the difference??


sorry its 4 am and i feel like ranting yay G-neric cafinated pop

for the most part round cables are more for looks and for better air flow as air tends to not go through walls very easy aka flat ribbon cable and will go around a pipe easy aka round cables the permormance of the 2 type is all but the same as far as i know

I have tested and in my benchmarks there was no difference...
of course Your results may vary..

but as mentioned.....they help quite a bit with airflow... wire management, and general cleanup in the case

I have personally not noticed any difference between the performance of either type of cable. Why would they sell rounded ide cables if they reduced the performance of your drive.. you think that would eliminate the point, no?
They would at least have to point the fact out on any product info provided.

Careful:



I use rounded, but that (your quote) is not a valid argument...
Why? marketing, corporate attornies, and profit....

the best example is in the 80's we had a choice between Beta and VHS...
Beta quality was far superior, but VHS was the standard of choice


Just my .02

Even the tapes were smaller!

Yeah, true.. but surely they would have to include this somewhere in the product spec (plus to able to market your cable as ata 100/133 it has to meet certain standards doesn't it?).

I agree with you..... I was just saying that we all need to be careful when we say that since it is the most popular, it must be best


in the case of round cables, I think it is.... good airflow, and a good signal

Hmm, I may be wrong here but the whole two way communication thing isn't why modern hard disks use 80 wires? They used to use 40 just like CD-ROMs. I thought the reasoning behind the 40 more wires was because the old 40 conductor cables couldn't cope with the speed of ATA66 and above speeds, so they had to add in some sorta ground wire between each one to stop interferance?

I'm pretty sure you'll find that there are still only 40 pins on the back of your hard disk and that your CD-ROM doesn't use an ATA133 interface because there's simply no need

oh there are so many quotes......

if you have ever noticed - those round cables are never ATA certified - ONLY called ROUND IDE CABLES ----1

every other wire in a flat ribbon cable (80 conductor) is a NC or ground wire -0 that is how ATA133 speeds can be reached without data corruption - wanna test on this? here - try using a 40 conductor cable on an ATA133 or even an ATA100 drive with a same speed slave connected - tell me when you click on a drive letter how long it takes for the drive to activate - then do a massive file transfer - say a 600 MB rar file - use both the round ATA cable, the flat ribbon 80 conductor cable - then use a 40 conductor cable --

make sure to keep track of how long windows says that it is going to take - as soon as it finish saying "preparing file transfer"

it is now that you will notice a change in performance - and remember - you might not be swapping 600MB files all day - but the speed is transfered down to 1K files as well - and well when you are gaming - your harddrive is always swapping data - swap files, temp ram, game file searching

trust me once you start using ur puter like it was a set of lungs - you tend to notice little performance "quirks" and i have noticed that round ide cables are frosted coated crap :S

for me its not an opinion - its a proven test - try it urself -
like exeter said

I personally don't see a performance difference. At all. Not even when I move/copy huge files like MindDrive says.

Remember that rounded cables can vary in quality.

Yes, every other wire in an 80-conductor cable is a ground, to help reduce interference/cross-talk between the other wires.

i herd that the antec cables are like that every wire is wraped with a like foil of some sort to prevent interference/cross-talk

EDIT GO HERE: http://www.antec.com/us/pro_details_access...hp?ProdID=77228

or if you dont want to here

Features:
Wrapped with UV-activated plastic tubing for maximum air flow improvement
40-pin 80-conductor cable, ATA133/100/66/33 compliant for high speed data transfer (A26 IDE cable)
Highly flexible 26" round cable (16" + 10") with two device connections, one motherboard connector.
Shielded with aluminum foil and braided silver mesh with ground, for maximum shielding

Im kinda lost. To many letters and numbers flying around to keep me intrested

what i kinda got was:

Round cables dont have ground wires, and flat ones do.

Crounching them up reduces performance.

Anyway my response to that is:

U can buy round ones that have ground connectors.
Electron flow isnt really hindered by twists and turns.

Ofcourse this is me while reading

If you buy good rounded cables or make them youself out of orginal ATA-133 cables there will be no preformance loss if use the cheaps one of course there going to suck

Reminds me that i have like 5 players and butt load of tapes to get rid of or fix....those are fun to play with!

My rounded cables were cheap but they claim to be ata 133... And they transfer at the exact same speed as my ata133 certified cables.. So... I don't know why I wouldn't use them considering no matter how hard I tried to move the flat cables out of the way they increased my case temp by 3 deg C and cpu temp by the same... =/... Therefore.. same performance... looks better... improved airflow.. seems like a no-brainer to me.

Firstly I have seen plenty of rounded IDE cables with labelled as ATA 100/133, I my experience they are hardly ever called just 'round ide cables' .. I'm not sure where you are getting this from exactly.


Secondly.. how can you say its proven test when you seem to be the only person who has had problems with them.. doesn't seem too scientific to me.

Edit - you seem to have a similar primary hdd to me.. maybe a comparison would be interesting (i assume you are using flat cables).. get HD Tach and we can compare.

thats all i have to say

beacuse they can B)

aren't we all moving to SATA anyway?

:smash: Yeah, who cares, Im using rounded cables I got off of eBay, havent noticed a difference....besides, benchmarks are just numbers

I dont think minddrive is, as the cables are relly small and rounded, they might not transfer data as fast as flat ribbon ata133 cables.

Uh, I hope you're just being sarcastic. SATA is GENERALLY faster than regular IDE, not MUCH faster, but slightly faster.

Yes, that was a joke.

ok, lol, sorry, kind of pissed of about people tking in BFV

It's all right.

I dont have rounded cables, I use the standard ATA 133/100...
I have looked into getting some a little while back and i do remember making sure they were ATA133/100 compatible and ..... sure enough... they were....

but yeah i mean, my HD's are on SATA now so really....it doesnt even matter to me, all i have to worry about are the CD and DVD-burners.....and thats not much that i would owrry about going out of my way to spend money on rounded cables when i have perfectly good cables right here....with the Burners being so far in front, and them being smaller in size depth wise, i cant imagine getting round cables would help THAT much... especially when my out-take fans are in the rear and back side panel....

P.S......ive also read somewhere...maybe here? that there was talk about DVD-burners moving to SATA due to the high speed demands of a DVD burner...

anyone know if thats true or make sence?

I believe all drives will have a sata option in the near future. Some of the new boards coming out will have 4 or more sata connectors (see new intel chipsets), so having two sata hdd and 2 sata burners/drives won't be a problem.

Their are already some SATA DVD-Roms's and such but their only for Intel Chipsets as of right now. I heard the next SATA Standard will incorporate use of CD-ROMs etc. on SATA.

And as for the whole round cable thing I don't see a performance hit when I use them but in my first build they really do help air flow. My case temps went down 2°C when I put them in so I left them in there. And if there is a performance difference its probaly slight.

I don't think that SATA makes that much difference, if anything it just lowers voltage consumption...

As of now 7200 rpm hard drives have a hard time keeping up with 133, why would a faster transfer method be better if you can't write/read it quickly enough?

Screw all of your ideas on how to do it. I got my own way. GET LONGER RIBBEN CABLES...

Get some nice long ones and flatten them out along the top and sides of your case itself. If they do have to go in front of an air circulation path, position the cable so that it is putting up as little resistance as possible (parallel with the air flow direction).

That's my method, and it works for me.

I am waiting on SATA-300 due out shortly as the name 300MB/s transfer burst mode most run 10krpm the highends 15krmp and 17.5krpm

some would say that there is interference....it would make sense if there was, but i benchmarked and i only noticed about a 4% decrease in speed between the ribbon cables and rounded cables.

dasterdly lol go here http://www.newegg.com/app/Showimage.asp?im...-131-505-06.jpg 10 freakin sata ports

Or you could just take your ribbon fold 'em over a few times and wrap them in electrical tape, did that in mine and it works great, cheap too

DOH - just noticed that a few of the wires in my round cable has a cut in it @_@ (OMG what a dunce) anyway - its been a LOOOOOoooonnngggg.... time since ive bought round cables - back when they first came out ~_~ they werent ATA certified and there was a lot of cross interference data corruption on bigger files. I noticed that the new cables actually have twisted pairs in them now much like CAT5 cables. AND yes i know about SATA and have SATA the next board im getting has SATA and SCSI on it - raid 0+1 configs - http://www.giga-byte.com/MotherBoard/Produ...Rev%202.0).htm#

so i guess my outdated cables need to be 86ed and this topic needs to die like my cables (been spending too much time on case mod'n and custom prodjects to keep up with new cables ) lmao

Rounded cables are fine. I've been using one for my CD-rom and floppy this whole time and never any problems. Both drives work great and detect fast. Unless you're a hardcore computer nerd, I don't think you'll notice a difference. Not to mention rounded cables look much nicer and have less resistence to air-flow.

Probably being said, but...





Duct tape + finger nails + flat IDE cables = home made rounded IDE cables, and they don't lack the grounds. Then, you can just heatshrink them with some UV reactive heatshrink. Voila.







Happy?

these are mine:



ribbon cables just look butt ugly after seeing these... on a few rare occassions, folding ribbon cables can be neater and present even less airflow restriction than rounded cables IF you can get them out of the way... it doesn't happen that way very often in my experience...

rounded cables are the same price or cheaper than ribbon cables anyway so what's the question again?

ya those cables rock man im gana git some antec ones tho only reason is its a company i trust

grrr - aparently some people missed the whole thing --- the ground wire between the data wire is to keep the data wires AWAY FROM EACHOTHER RUNNING PARALLEL!!!!! if you split cables - coil them up - bend them over eachother, then what you are doing is bypassing that whole "KEEPING THEM SEPARATE" purpose!

thats why they started twisting the wire pairs - but what do i know

But the performance difference is minmal to non-exsistant it was most people have been saying.

well in my system - i have the page file set on my slave drive as to keep the primary drives activity to a minimum when gaming - in my system it works great - almost like having twice the speed when running programs