-- Installation
and Results
-- Page: 1
2
These machine rounded cables are a little stiffer than the
traditional flat and hand rounded variety. The plastic covering
is most likely the culprit here. They are still bendable
though, so there should not be any problems in regards to maneuvering
it within your case. Just give yourself some room to work with
before you put everything in.
I first stuck the 50-Pin SCSI in the
adapter. I have this connected to a Ricoh 6X4X24 CD-RW.
Here's a shot of it connected to the
floppy and the other drives. The floppy was long enough for my
full tower, which had the floppy drive situated up near the top.
The tower stands at about 2.5 feet.
For our test, we will be using:
We turned down all our fans and left
only 3 on. The front intake and the rear exhaust are the only
ones that will be on, this hopefully will create enough air flow to run our
tests. Room temperature stayed a constant 27C throughout.
Before we installed these cables the
temperature, data transfer speed and CD-Writing speed were all
recorded with the flat and hand rounded cables. The results of these prior tests will be compared to
the set of machine rounded cables to show any differences.
The data transfer consisted of moving a
CD image of Windows 98SE from our primary master drive (C:\ - WD 27GB ata/66)
to a secondary master drive (E:\ - Seagate Barracuda 30GB ata/66).
The image is a bin file, 719mb, created using CDR-Win. The
transfer was tested 3 times and an average time to move the
file from one drive to another was recorded.
The Windows 98SE image was also burned
using all three types of cables and an average time was taken from 3
tries. I used Kingston 8X certified CD-Rs, all burning the
same image we were transferring back and forth from our C: and E:
drives.
|
Test
Cables |
Case Temp. |
MBoard Temp. |
Data
X-Fer |
CD
Burn |
| Flat Cables |
29C |
31C |
43secs |
13mins |
| Hand Rounded |
28.6C |
31C |
44secs |
13mins |
| Machine Rounded |
28.5C |
31C |
44secs |
13mins |
After 9 CDrs,
half a morning moving this 719mb file back and forth, and installing
our burnt image of Windows 98SE on a secondary machine, I have
concluded that the machine rounded cables do not degrade data.
Neither does the flat or hand rounded variety. I took one of
the burnt copies of Windows 98SE and installed it on our secondary
rig, nothing went wrong and all went well. There was a slight 1
sec decrease in transfer speed when moving that image across to our
secondary drive, but that may be so miniscule to even be considered
a problem. Please be advised, the hand rounded version did not
expose any wire, all were done with a hobby knife and wrapped with
electrical tape.
I'll be keeping these cables in our
boxes because they look sweet and do lower the temperatures
somewhat. Not exactly the smashing temperature performance
that I would like, but any kind of temperature drop is a good one.
Thanks to SideWinder
Computers and HighSpeed PC
for participating in our little test. Give them a visit, they
have all these cables in stock and all waiting for a box to go into.
Pros:
- Rounded and Pretty
- Lowers Temps Very Slightly
- No Data Degradation
Cons:
- May be expensive for a select few
- Plastic casing feels greasy!
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