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Rounded IDE cables cause HDD slowness?

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davidrees

Senior member
I am getting low HD numbers on Sysmark (under 500) using an EPoX 8K7A mobo and a Quantum Fireball 40G ATA 100 drive.

I have rounded IDE cables and I am begining to think they hurt my HDD performance.

Isn't the purpose of the extra 40 wires on an ATA100 cable to cut interference and crosstalk by grounding? it seems like the individual wire strands in a rounded cable would lose that benefit.

A while back I was getting scores over 700 - and I was using the round cables, but in this new case, the cables distort more.

Anyone have any insight?

 
If you were getting higher scores w/ those cables before I doubt thats your problem. Did you change anything else besides the case? What mode is your HDD running in? Is your ATA-100 controller enabled in BIOS? Just a few things to check.
 
could be a crappy drive... I had an ata100 7200rpm maxtor 30gb drive that would get scores in sandra of around 4000-6000. a comparable seagate 30gb 7200rpm ata66 drive was getting scores of 20000+

and it wasnt a cable issue, a driver issue, or anything like that... it performed like that in every system I put it in
 
I get 550 right now, which is awful. If I put fresh 4 in 1s in, it is well over 700. Something with winXP keeps killing the 4 in1s, and I can't figure it out, I have something set to display here if the via drivers load, but for some reason, they only load sometimes.

My rounded cables are fine, its just windows that keeps screwing up. It did the same with with flat cables.
 
I get 25400 (Sandra) with my Maxtor 60gb ATA-100 drive using rounded cables...sounds like a driver issue, especially if you have a VIA chipset and use the VIA drivers.

Or if you are using XP, could be a VIA/XP conflict.
 
There were some benchmarks done somewhere a while back that showed no perceptible difference between rounded and flat cables, provided that the rounded cables were manufactured properly. A few early reports of performance hits from round cables were due to people making their own, and making mistakes, before the manufacturers saw the market.
 
to help narrow the problem down, run a benchmark that shows burst or buffered read speed. If the buffered read speed is up around 70-80mb/s then you know that it is not an interface or driver problem.

i know sisoft sandra and hdtach both will test buffered read, sysmark may or may not
 
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