SATA Cable Experiment - Does Quality Affect SSD Performance Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2012-05-07
·
842 words · ~4 min read
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SATA cables something you rarely think about but today's test is going to be in
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my opinion pretty interesting because I recently had a s cable die on me it was
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one of these ancient uh DFI land party
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ones that I've kept around because they're awesome and their UV yellow and
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stuff um not this one it was a different one so it occurred to me that there's
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probably different stages of failur Ness in a particular cable maybe there is
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maybe there isn't I know DVI cables there's they work or they don't uh
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whereas VGA cables there's a wide spectrum of quality in terms of the uh
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the signal that they can transmit so what I'm going to do is I'm going to take four different SATA cables
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including this is an Intel one right here with proper locking connectors on
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there you go on whoops both sides there you go locking connectors both sides I'm
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going to take an older style one with no locking connector I'm going to take a
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long cable there you go so that's a
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significantly longer cable going to take another Intel one although a different
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style without locking connectors and then I'm going to just take like some
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random like the cheapest feeling one I could find and then what I'm going to
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do is run the as SSD ass SSD Benchmark a
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number of times on the drive first with the original cable which I'm going to
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use as my sort of assumed fine cable
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it's Intel cable uh made by bizlink
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there you go bizlink something like that
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you can see that there you go and then uh so I'll run it a few times to make
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sure I get consistent results and then I'm going to go ahead and start swapping
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cables and see what kind of results I get stay tuned guys my control tests are
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all run so this is this is pretty representative of what we get with the
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Intel cable now let's start running some of the other cables I'm going to start
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with the long foxcon
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cable I've been asked any number of times uh to explain the difference
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especially when they're included with motherboards between SATA 6 gbit per
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second cables I'm really not sure if you guys can read that or not well it says SATA 6 GB per second uh and the
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SATA 2 3 GB per second cables that are
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included with motherboards and uh based on the results that I'm getting with
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this particular cable compared to the ones that I've already run which are the
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Intel cable the foxcon long cable and
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the old crappy DFI cable uh it looks like the answer is
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what I suspected all along but never had any empirical data to prove uh looks
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like it we're going to end up with pretty much identical results so I'll
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show you guys the the final ones but yeah this is an unexpected addition to
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the test that I hadn't uh thought of doing before well I finished my last
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test so this means that the results that I have are pretty much final so like I
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said this is pretty much what I figured would happen uh these first four are
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actually all the Intel cable just to for
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me to run some attests back to back to figure out what the uh what the
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consistency of results was going to be like so you can see the overall Benchmark score so we're going to call
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these four scores sort of our margin of our margin of error so anywhere from 470
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to 464 will be considered to be a
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um sort of consistent Benchmark score with our with our control group so here
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the long cable the first run the long cable the second run so I stopped doing
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two runs per cable when I realized how close together results were going to be
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here's the old crappy DFI cable here is
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the ASUS 6 GB pers second specific cable
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here is the red generic cable so what did we learn today folks as long as your
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SATA cable works it seems to pretty much work that is not to say that cables
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cannot be defective I do have defective SATA cables that don't work at all and
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cause glitchy Behavior but that's pretty rare I've only had about two or three
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SATA cables die on me in the years that SATA's been uh a relevant standard
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so I think that pretty much covers it thank you for checking out this little
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episode on lonus Tech tips about SATA
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cables an exciting topic don't forget to subscribe for more unboxings reviews and
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other computer videos about ssds like
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this one or the cable that plugs into it