Serial Port Failure

[exar333]

I work in a job where I support multiple types of POS systems (literally, sometimes) that feature serial connections for most of the peripherals. Some of the systems use a traditional serial port directly on the motherboard, while others have ports that connect via cable to pins on the MB. Would anyone have any "solid" data or good experience on which one would fail more often? or maybe they would be the same? This is asked out of mostly curiosity! Any info would be great!

 

[phisrow]

I imagine that the ones with cables are incrementally more likely to fail, as they have more potentially flakey interconnects in the data path; but I must admit that I've never seen either one fail, and certainly not for mechanical reasons. With regard to socket damage and controllers being borked the two would be identical, and the potentially delicate cable is not usually exposed to stress.

I'd vote "same".