Product: Round Gold Braded ATA 66/100/133 Cables
Application: ATA Cables
Provided by: CrazyPC
Review by: Paul
Review date: June 1st, 2002

     Round cables are great.  No more band-aids, no more cut fingers.  Back in the early days of case modding, Scott, Mike and I used to set around at the Club with our razor blades and hack up perfectly good IDE ribbon cable.  We even got pretty fancy and put some colorful heat shrink on our new "round" cables.  They weren't true round.  We grouped them in four strand bundles and it kind of made them square.  Times have changed and now companies have made it so that someone with no talent what so ever can have a cool looking case.  I'm not bitter, though.  Great products like this make the modding community progress even further.  Now for you to have a truly nice modified case, that someone can't just go buy, you have to be very creative.  This is the way we evolve.  This isn't the type of cable you can sit down and make either.  These are nice professional cables.

     Let me tell you some things about IDE cables that you may not know.  The shielding on these cables is very important.  If the cable is not shielded properly, you will get noise.  Noise will corrupt files and ruin your file transfers.  On the older ATA 33 cables this was not a problem.  The problem started with the faster drives.  The ATA66, 100, and 133 cables require proper shielding.  Now, you may have heard about the shielding, but what about the length?  Does the length make a difference?  It sure does.  The max length of an IDE cable should not be longer than 18 inches.  What about those cables that are 24" and longer?  I don't own any of them.  After 18inches your data is more susceptible to corruption.  Hey, maybe the 40% fail rate on the IBM GXP series hard drives are related to long IDE cables...  NOT!!!

     These cables fall within this standard.  The longest cable they have is 18" they also sent me a 12" floppy cable and a 12" IDE cable.  You may be wondering why we have such tall towers if the max cable length is 18".  These tall towers are considered server cases, and server cases were designed more for SCSI drives.  SCSI drives don't have the same length restrictions as IDE.

Installing and Testing

     Installing these cables are the same as most other cables.  These are fairly fool-proof.  Each end is color-keyed and if you need to remove them they have a nice pull tab on each end.

     Testing was accomplished to insure there wasn't any crosstalk or noise.  I performed the drive benchmark in Sisoft Sandra then burned a data disk from the harddrive.  Here are the results.

     I wasn't expecting the performance to increase.  I can not say that my benchmark score went up 2000 points just because I put these cables on.  Take these results how you want.  My main intention was to make sure the performance didn't decrease.  They certainly didn't decrease.  Now, the burn test.
I took 4 files from my harddrive totally 700MB and burned them to my mitsumi 24x12x40.  Again, the purpose of this test is to check for data corruption and "noise" which would slow down, if not stop, the burn.  The same media and the same files were used in both burns.  Nero 5.5 was the burn program used.

     1 second is nothing to worry about.  The slow time is a result of the 16x media used.  From the results of my two benches I think it's safe to assume there is no cross-talk or noise from these cables.  Plus they look very cool.

     I have nothing negative to say about these cables.  They are within the 18" specification and they are only $9.95 each.  Pick your set up at CrazyPC!