detrimental effects of "round" cables?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Timothy Daniels
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Timothy Daniels

Has anyone had any experience with ATA/133 drives
going to "round" cables? I've got a couple new Maxtor
7200 rpm DiamondMax drives with 8MB cache that
need a home, and since my mid-tower case will get a
CD burner and a couple new PCI adapter cards, I
figured the improved airflow afforded by "round" cables
would help control the heat. But... at 133MHz, will
the bunched physical arrangement of the wires in the
"round" cable introduce signal anomalies, resulting in
errors?

Since so few people could actually measure the
electrical difference between ribbon and "round" cables,
has anyone who had an ATA/133 HD and then had gone
to "round" cables noticed any decrease in file transfer
speed?


*TimDaniels*
 
Previously Timothy Daniels said:
Has anyone had any experience with ATA/133 drives
going to "round" cables? I've got a couple new Maxtor
7200 rpm DiamondMax drives with 8MB cache that
need a home, and since my mid-tower case will get a
CD burner and a couple new PCI adapter cards, I
figured the improved airflow afforded by "round" cables
would help control the heat. But... at 133MHz, will
the bunched physical arrangement of the wires in the
"round" cable introduce signal anomalies, resulting in
errors?
Click to expand...
Since so few people could actually measure the
electrical difference between ribbon and "round" cables,
has anyone who had an ATA/133 HD and then had gone
to "round" cables noticed any decrease in file transfer
speed?
Click to expand...

Round cables are more likely to introduce errors. If they are
used with newer HDDs there is usually no problem, because
these do error detection and correction on the IDE bus.
However I some problems:

1) A current CD0burner (TEAC CD-W 540E) did burn disks
with bit-errors when used with a round cable (no
read error though).
2) A 90cm rounded cable produced so many errors that
my Linux kernel decided that the disk was defective
and took it down. It could also have been the disk
that decided it was not use working on this bus, I
do not quite remember.
Cutting the cable down to 60cm and using it with
a single drive solved the problem.

So no, the bus will become unusable lomg before there
is any significant speed decrease.

Arno
 
Arno Wagner said:
Round cables are more likely to introduce errors. If they are
used with newer HDDs there is usually no problem, because
these do error detection and correction on the IDE bus.
However I [had] some problems:

1) A current CD0burner (TEAC CD-W 540E) did burn
disks with bit-errors when used with a round cable (no
read error though).
2) A 90cm rounded cable produced so many errors that
my Linux kernel decided that the disk was defective
and took it down. It could also have been the disk
that decided it was not use working on this bus, I
do not quite remember.
Cutting the cable down to 60cm and using it with
a single drive solved the problem.

So no, the bus will become unusable lomg before there
is any significant speed decrease.
Click to expand...


The longest cable that I purchased was 24" (about 60cm)
in total length (8" from the slave connector to the master
connector, 16" from the master to the board connector).
What was the length of the cable that you used with the
TEAC CD burner? Did that cable have an outer metal
braid for shielding?


*TimDaniels*
 
Previously Timothy Daniels said:
"Arno Wagner" wrote: [...]

The longest cable that I purchased was 24" (about 60cm)
in total length (8" from the slave connector to the master
connector, 16" from the master to the board connector).
What was the length of the cable that you used with the
TEAC CD burner? Did that cable have an outer metal
braid for shielding?
Click to expand...

I had the problem with the burner with a short cable (45cm
or 48cm) as far as I remember. I think it was a CoolerMaster
quality cable with shielding. The problem is that while newer
UDMA standards seem to require CRC-checking in all modes,
this burner seems not to do it when writing. I have no idea
whether it sends out CRC codes when reading, but I did not
observe a single read error from correctly burned CDs
and the bit-errors on the incorrect CDs did not change.

The shop where I bought the burner told me that they knew
about the problem and that some writers should not be used
with rounded cables at all, while others can be without
problem. It could be that a firmware-upgrade solves
this problem, but I am too lazy to try. My posting
was just to warn people to be careful, since a few (1..10)
bit-errors in a full CD might not be immediately noticable
but still cause problems.

I have some cheap 60cm (actually cut down 90cm) cables in
use with HDDs for some time now without problems. These are
twisted pair without shielding or brand name.

Arno
 
Some pathetic excuse for a bullshit artist/pathological liar claiming to be
Uh, right.
Click to expand...

Even you should be able to do better than that pathetic effort, child.

Try another lie and see if anyone is silly enough to believe it.
 
Some pathetic excuse for a bullshit artist/pathological liar claiming to be



Even you should be able to do better than that pathetic effort, child.

Try another lie and see if anyone is silly enough to believe it.
Click to expand...

There is no sense in debating you: when, as not infrequently happens,
someone demonstrates that you are wrong, you begin to say the same
thing over and over again, like a petulant child.

Josh
 
Some pathetic excuse for a bullshit artist/pathological liar claiming to be
just the pathetic excuse for bullshit/pathological lies that it always
ends up having to resort to when its got done like a dinner, yet again.
 
Arno Wagner said:
I had the problem with the burner with a short cable (45cm
or 48cm) as far as I remember. I think it was a CoolerMaster
quality cable with shielding. The problem is that while newer
UDMA standards seem to require CRC-checking in all modes,
this burner seems not to do it when writing. I have no idea
whether it sends out CRC codes when reading, but I did not
observe a single read error from correctly burned CDs
and the bit-errors on the incorrect CDs did not change.

The shop where I bought the burner told me that they knew
about the problem and that some writers should not be used
with rounded cables at all, while others can be without
problem. It could be that a firmware-upgrade solves
this problem, but I am too lazy to try. My posting
was just to warn people to be careful, since a few (1..10)
bit-errors in a full CD might not be immediately noticable
but still cause problems.

I have some cheap 60cm (actually cut down 90cm) cables in
use with HDDs for some time now without problems. These are
twisted pair without shielding or brand name.
Click to expand...


I just checked the cables I bought from Fry's (which are
the Vantec brand). Each of the 40 colored wires is twisted
together with a white wire (making 80 conductors in all).

A call to Vantec USA in Fremont, Calif., (webpage at
http://vantecusa.com/ide.html ) confirmed that their round
cables have 80 conductors, 40 of them ground wires -
twisted with one of the colored wires.

I also see that the website for SVC says that their round
cables have twisted pairs. (See their webpage at:

<http://www.svc.com/cables-ata-100-133-round-cables-18--dual-device-ata-100-
133-round-cables.html>

I have no idea whether other round cables have only 40
conductors, but I'd bet that the ones described as "ATA133"
have the 80 conductors with each colored conductor
twisted with a white ground conductor. Could it be that
the round cables that you had problems with only had
40 conductors?


*TimDaniels*
 
Previously Timothy Daniels said:
"Arno Wagner" wrote: [...]
I have no idea whether other round cables have only 40
conductors, but I'd bet that the ones described as "ATA133"
have the 80 conductors with each colored conductor
twisted with a white ground conductor. Could it be that
the round cables that you had problems with only had
40 conductors?
Click to expand...

No, definitely not. Rounded-non-twisted pair cables would have
atrociously bad signal characteristics. I never had/saw such a
cable. What I had where 1-10 single bit errors in a 500MB CD. This is
a relatively low error rate and I at first suspected the burner.
Note that this are not errors on the CD, but just wrong data.

The problem is just that even high-quality rounded cables
have a significantly higher error rate. From UDMA66
on there never was a specification that allowed data transfer
without error checking. For UDMA33 error checking was only
added later. Since CD-R(W) drives usually use UDMA33 or
below, they just might not do the error checking, and I
actually have one that indeed does not check, at least when
writing data. It is a little funny that I never had any
read errors with the drive, so maybe it adds checksums
in the data it sends, but does not verify checksums in the
data it gets. Or maybe it just sends data slower than it
can receive data, which also makes the signal more immune
to disturbances.

I am not saying that this is correct behaviour, but merely
that this is observed behaviour. Burning several CDs
and then verifying their contents against the images
they where burned from can be used to verify whether this
problem exists with a burner. I now just use an old
40-conductor flat cable and have no problems at all with
the burner.

It is possible that new burners do not have this problem
at all.

Regards,
Arno
 
Some pathetic excuse for a bullshit artist/pathological liar claiming to be
just the pathetic excuse for bullshit/pathological lies that it always
ends up having to resort to when its got done like a dinner, yet again.
Click to expand...

As I said.

Well, not much that I can do, except to suggest you might want to
query a psychology newsgroup about your developmental problems

Josh
 
Some pathetic excuse for a bullshit artist/pathological liar claiming to be
just the pathetic excuse for bullshit/pathological lies that it always
ends up having to resort to when its got done like a dinner, yet again.
 
Rod said:
Some pathetic excuse for a bullshit artist/pathological liar claiming to be
just the pathetic excuse for bullshit/pathological lies that it always
ends up having to resort to when its got done like a dinner, yet again.
Click to expand...


Hello

I have not read this or some of the other groups for some time.
Why does almost every thread turn abusive? This is something new.

Mike Engles
 
"Mike Engles" observed:
Hello

I have not read this or some of the other groups for some time.
Why does almost every thread turn abusive? This is something new.
Click to expand...


"Rod Speed", et al, are a flock of trolls all spawned by the same
retiree who has more time than self-esteem on his hands, and who
gets off on telling people what to do. Ignore them, they're just
part of the background noise.


*TimDaniels*
 
You complain about trolls, but *you* are the one flooding this newsgroup with
trivial messages.

If you have enough RAM it doesn't matter what drive your ****ing pagefile is
on, what filesystem, etc. For me that's 255MB, and my pagefile grows to only
18MB.

Why don't you investigate whether your system is paging before wasting any
more bandwidth?

|
| "Rod Speed", et al, are a flock of trolls all spawned by the same
| retiree who has more time than self-esteem on his hands, and who
| gets off on telling people what to do. Ignore them, they're just
| part of the background noise.
|
|
| *TimDaniels*
 
Because theres a whole load of people who just cant make it in life so they
take out their frustrations here.
 
Timothy Daniels said:
"Mike Engles" observed:


"Rod Speed", et al,
Click to expand...

Basically all of this group, isn't it Timmy.
are a flock of trolls all spawned by the same
retiree who has more time than self-esteem on his hands,
Click to expand...

Says he who has no time to buy a new computer yet has lots of time
to ask mostly rethorical questions.
and who gets off on telling people what to do.
Click to expand...
Ignore them, they're just part of the background noise.
Click to expand...

Actually, there would not be so much noise if some people learned
to ignore Timmy Daniels and his mostly rethorical questions.
 
"CSX" explained:
Because theres a whole load of people who just cant
make it in life so they take out their frustrations here.
Click to expand...


And that "whole load of people" is all one sick guy!
<LOL>
There's a pack of trolls here who are the product of
one guy's permanent disability and his disability
payments. I think he fell into the soldering machine at
the hard drive factory, and now he collects disability
and sits in his trailer park all day inventing new
personalities. The trouble is... they all sound the same!
:-)


*TimDaniels*
 
Some pathetic little desperately wanking child claiming to be
Timothy Daniels <[email protected]> desperately
attempted to bullshit its way out of its predicament after
all except one fool rubbed its nose in its terminal stupiditys
in message and fooled absolutely no one at all. As always.
 
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