Is it ok to use rounded cables on DVDRW/CDRW drives?

Silencing hard drives, optical drives and other storage devices

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Thorz
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Is it ok to use rounded cables on DVDRW/CDRW drives?

Post by Thorz » Fri Mar 04, 2005 9:05 pm

Hi m8s.

Question looks maybe obvious, but I have been having problems with some rounded cables and my CD-RW, I have decided to change the cable for a normal flat 40 threads cable that came with my Asus board.

Is it ok to use rounded 80 thread cables (almost all they sell are these ones made for P-ATA133 hard disks) with these devices? Or is it safer to use a normal old style 40 threads flat cable?

If the rounded ones are ok I will order some new ones that can give me better quality than these custom made ones that I bought 3 years ago.

Thank you.

NeilBlanchard
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Post by NeilBlanchard » Fri Mar 04, 2005 9:41 pm

Hello:

Here's how I understand this to work: A good flat 80 wire cable will provide better data integrity than a good round cable. I don't think most optical drives push as much bandwidth as a hard drive (though I could be wrong), so a good 40 wire flat cable is probably better than a round cable.

You are probably "safer" with flat cables, and they will certainly cost you less money. You do have to use the best, and shortest round cables to be as "safe" as typical flat cable.

As for any air flow issues: do a search on SPCR for "cablegami" and take a look at how well flat cables can be set up!

Zyzzyx
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Post by Zyzzyx » Fri Mar 04, 2005 10:26 pm

And I would say that a good cablegami setup with flat cables can look better than a setup with round cables flopping around.

My own cablegami work, and I've done better since then.


If you are going to use rounded cables, I would trust some of the better quality ones than something custom and homebuilt.

elasticdog
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Post by elasticdog » Sat Mar 05, 2005 10:41 am

I've been looking into the differences quite a bit lately, and I'd say for the CD-RW, you should be fine with the 40-wire flat cable.

You'd probably be a bit safer using the 80-wire (40-pin) flat cable (especially if you want to burn at higher than 24x speed), as the extra wires are just ground wires in between each signal wire meant to cut down on cross-talk. That helps to eliminate transmission errors, which in turn means less signals having to be sent more than once, which means overall better transfer rate.

Some people say round cables are bad since they bunch all of those 80 wires together, and thus negate any cross-talk-eliminating benefit of the extra wires in the first place by placing them all in close proximity to eachother. This is true, although I have seen at least one company that made round cables that specifically folded them in layers of 4 wires, then stacked them up with sheilding in between. Those types of round cables would be great, but I can't say that most of the one's you'd find would be like that. I can't remember the name of the brand off the top of my head, but I do remember they were decently expensive.

Anyway, to sum all that up, 80-wire/40-pin flat cables are probably the best way to go, and cablegami takes some time and patience, but definitely helps out with keeping the wires out of the airflow.

Thorz
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Joined: Sun Feb 13, 2005 8:01 pm

Post by Thorz » Sat Mar 05, 2005 3:46 pm

Cablegami with 80 wire cables is then the ticket. Thanks for the answers.

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