SATA Lead Question

[Welshchris]

I was asked a question earlier by someone who wants me to build a gaming system 4 them and i dont really know the answer.

Obviously being a gaming system he wants the system to transfer data as smoothly as possible, the question was .... Do branded sata leads such as AKASA perform better than generic ones that come with motherboards?

Anyone know?

Thanks.

[Halcyon]

I very much doubt it.
A sata cable is a sata cable, whatever you do to it.

What matters more is the SATA speed of the hard drive as sata1 (1.5Gbit) is slower than sata2. (3Gbit)
However, most modern motherboards and hard drives will be Sata2 ready.
Do note that on some drives you need to remove a little jumper on the back to enable it to run at sata2 instead of sata1.

The only difference between cables that I can see is that some newer ones have a latch on them to clip them in place.
Does not make any performance increase at all.

[Stuart]

Originally Posted by Welshchris

Obviously being a gaming system he wants the system to transfer data as smoothly as possible, the question was .... Do branded sata leads such as AKASA perform better than generic ones that come with motherboards?

Doubtful. While expensive cables do make a difference with Analogue signals, with digital signals, they only make a difference over long distance (more than 10 metres). It's unlikely that a SATA cable is going to be any longer than half a metre so (indeed, I don't know if you can get a SATA cable 10 metres or longer, or if one would work).

[Dai]

Originally Posted by Stuart C

Doubtful. While expensive cables do make a difference with Analogue signals, with digital signals, they only make a difference over long distance (more than 10 metres). It's unlikely that a SATA cable is going to be any longer than half a metre so (indeed, I don't know if you can get a SATA cable 10 metres or longer, or if one would work).

I believe the SATA spec says a maximum of 1 metre cable length.

I'd certainly get the 'clippy' cables if possible, the older design always felt very insecure to me.

There certainly are better cables than others. As Dai and Hal says cables that clip are a lot better than those that dont. Often generic cables fit way to loosely and often when you mess inside tou can knock them out. Then you have those with angled ends that can make cable routing easier

[Welshchris]

Thanks for ur help guys. The hard disk in Question i will be using is a SATA 2 hard disk with 32mb cache.

[AbyssUnderground]

Bear in mind that the hard disk will never reach the speed of the SATA interface anyway, most drives only hit about 1Gbps read/write, where as the interface is 1.5Gbps/3Gbps. You won't see much difference either way but going with SATAII will give you future proof upgrading.

[AntiSilence]

Serial data is a digital signal so all the cables will be as good as each other, apart from, as Zingle says, the connectors themselves can be a bit loose on some/