Gadgetory

SATA cables something you rarely think about but today's test is going to be in my opinion pretty interesting because I recently have a say the cable died on me it was one of these ancient dfi LAN party ones that I've kept around because they're awesome and they're UV yellow and stuff not this one it was a different one so it occurred to me that there's probably different stages of failure nests in a particular cable maybe there is maybe there hasn't kind of DVI cables there's they work or they don't whereas VGA cables there's a wide spectrum of quality in terms of the the signal that they can transmit so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take four different SATA cables including this is an Intel one right here with proper locking connectors on you go on whoops both sides now you go locking connectors both sides I'm gonna take an older-style one with no locking connectors I'm gonna take a long cable there you go so that's a significantly longer cable I'm gonna take another Intel one although a different style without locking connectors and then I'm gonna just take like some random like the cheapest feeling one I could find and then what I'm going to do is run the as SSD a s SSD benchmark a number of times on the drive first with the original cable which I'm going to use as my sort of assumed fine cable it's an Intel cable made by is link there you go there's link something like that you can see that there you go and then I've so I'll run it a few times to make sure I get consistent results and then I'm going to go ahead and start swapping cables and see what kind of results I get stay tuned guys my control tests are all run so this is this is pretty representative of what we get with the Intel cable now let's start running some of the other cables I'm gonna start with the long Foxconn cable I've been asked any number of times to explain the difference especially when they're included with motherboards between SATA 6 gigabits per second cables really not sure if you guys can read that well it says say 260 bit per second and the say that - 3 gigabit per second cables that are included with motherboards and based on the results that I'm getting with this particular cable compared to the ones that I've already run which are the Intel cable the Foxconn long cable and the old crappy dfi cable it looks like the answer is what I suspected all along but never had any empirical data to prove looks like we're gonna end up with pretty much identical results so I'll show you guys the the final ones but yet this is an unexpected addition to the test that I hadn't thought of doing before well I finished my last test so this means that the results that I have are pretty much final so like I said it's pretty much what I figured would happen these first four are actually all the Intel cable just two for me to run some tests back to back to figure out what the what the consistency of results was going to be like so you can see the overall benchmark score so we're gonna call these four scores sort of our margin of our margin of error so anywhere from 470 to 464 will be considered to be a sort of consistent benchmark score with our with our control group so here's the long cable the first run the long cable the second run so I stopped doing two runs per cable when I realized how close together results were going to be here's the old crappy deify cable here is the asus six gigabit per second specific cable here is the red generic cable so what did we learn today folks as long as your SATA cable works it seems to pretty much work that is not to say that cables cannot be defective I do have defective SATA cables that don't work at all and cause glitchy behavior but that's pretty rare I've only had about two or three SATA cables died on me in the years that say there's been a relevant standard so I think that pretty much covers it thank you for checking out this little episode on Linus tech tips about SATA cables an exciting topic don't forget to subscribe for more bucks interviews other computer videos about SSDs like this one or the cable that plugs into it