|
Introduction
Recently in a forum I frequent, a comment was made about whether or not rounded cables offered the same performance of unaltered flat ribbon cables. Since I personally run all rounded cables inside of my system, I had my interest peaked, to say the least, as to whether or not this was actually true. So I decided I'd give it a test to see if it was true or not. I was hoping the data cited in the forum was inaccurate as they were quoting as much as a 60% performance drop between a flat ribbon cable and a hand rounded ATA-100 cable.
The Re-Write
After this article was first posted here, some very astute (and a couple less astute people who were too scared to register) made some comments on what I had written. Making some suggestions on what I should have added to the article and what I completely missed. One thing I will do for you guys is, I will NEVER write an article in notepad again. The lack of a spell check is quite annoying. Thanks to those of you out there who did catch my mistakes, I appreciate any and all useful and constructive feedback on stuff like this.
The Test
Well, before I go into my test here's some system specs to help you gauge what I'm talking about.
My Computer A.K.A. the test-bed:
Thunderbird 800 @ 800 (non-OC'd for testing purposes)
Asus A7V Motherboard with ATA-66 and ATA-100 controllers onboard
GF2 MX 32MB Video card
SB Live Platinum classic
6X DVD
CD-RW drive
256MB PC133 Micron SDRAM
Hard Drives:
IBM Deskstar 75GXP 30GB drive
Western Digital 30GB 7200 RPM ATA 100
System information:
Windows 2K Pro Original release version, no service packs or unnecessary updates installed.
Promise ATA-100 controller onboard running driver v1.0.0.0 off the Asus CD original
Now onto the tests:
The original test
The test bed was a non-partitioned Western Digital 30GB ATA-100 drive stationed alone on my Asus A7V's ATA-100 controller. HD Tach was used as the testing/benchmarking software. I ran both the read and write tests on it.
The cables used:
- Generic flat ATA-33 40 wire ribbon cable [no picture]
- Hand Rounded ATA-33 40 wire ribbon cable
(I had these handy for testing purposes, just to see what happened)
- WD OEM ATA-100 flat 80 wire ribbon cable
- WD OEM ATA-100 hand rounded 80 wire ribbon cable
- Machine Rounded ATA-100 80 wire ribbon cable purchased from FrozenCPU.com
Hand Rounded ATA-33 40 wire ribbon cable
WD OEM ATA-100 flat 80 wire ribbon cable
WD OEM ATA-100 hand rounded 80 wire ribbon cable
Machine Rounded ATA-100 80 wire ribbon cable purchased from FrozenCPU.com
For testing I ran HD Tach on the ata-33's once each, and twice each on the ATA-100 cables. Took screencaps of the results and saved them. Now onto the results.
>> The Results
|
