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Conclusion
Well, here's what I came up with on the tests. There was a 1% difference roughly between the high and low-end performance on the ATA-100 cables. I hardly find this to be anywhere near the 60% drop that some other people was quoting. Surprisingly the machine-rounded cable from www.frozencpu.com bested even the flat cable slightly. Granted the difference would go under the "negligible" description, but it's worth noting. It probably has to do with how the cable was rounded.
What really surprised me was how well the ATA-33 cables did in the test, only coming in about 2MB/s behind the ATA-100. That was impressive. I'm almost tempted to think the whole 80 ribbon cables we're spending a LOT more money for are purely hype. But once higher throughput devices come out I expect the ATA-33 cables to remain at near where they were in this test while the ATA-100 picks up speed to match the new drives.
Now some people don't know why people round their cables in the computer. Well, the simple reason is 'airflow'. The flat IDE and SCSI cables are SO bad for airflow in a case simply because they're SO wide and flat. They get in the way of any kind of decent airflow. An added bonus to the rounded cables is that they're easier to move around inside the case than the normal flat ones are, meaning installation of them is simpler for you to do.
The conclusion, go ahead and round your cables if you've got the steady hand to do that. The ata-100's were difficult to do, but not impossible. The machine rounded ones available online are not cheap, but they obviously do a great job, and I say they're worth the money.
New Conclusion
Apparently Windows sucks as an operating system. Wait, that wasn't what this article was about…. Oh, wait; I know why I said that. The newer results you see in the test on the Deskstar are extremely lackluster in performance, and it's all due to the operating system. The major spikes you see in the Deskstar where the performance goes thru the floor, is when windows tried to do something while running the test. However the new test does help point out some things that are kinda useful. The ATA-33 cables don't slow much when using a lower performance ATA-100 drive even, as shown in the WD tests, they only lagged by about 2MB/s. Whereas, in the IBM tests, the high-end speeds were notably above what the ATA-33 cable could run. I'll have to remind myself that the next time I reformat my system, I can switch drives and do the test on the IBM where windows isn't raping it the whole time.
Hopefully this update helped clean up some of the issues there were with my last one. Special thanks to those who gave me some constructive feedback: rstarr the forum regular ;), diocco, bd134492, a couple of unregistered folks that gave good feedback, Honda (the dude from the [H]ardForum who kicked me into writing this thing), Nicholas Bodley and Chuck Tribolet for some serious tech feedback. Thanks for the feedback guys, if you feel like handing me any more, feel free!
-Mike
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