SUMMARY: What would you say if I were to tell you of a set of rounded ATA cables that will reportedly give you faster data rates? Think I'm crazy? Come join Mike "Darthtanion" Wright as he takes a look at a set of IOSS RD3XP Rounded Cables. They claim to be able to do exactly this and it is time to find out if they can really live up to such a claim!
So how in the world can anyone claim to help data flow at a faster rate than with normal cabling? To give you an idea, let me show you the internal workings of this special set of cables:
As you can see, the cable uses eight layers of ten wires to achieve the rounding. This allows each signal wire to be surrounded by ground wires to help keep the signal as free as possible from outside interference. But to make things even better, this cable also has an aluminum shielding between every single layer of wires. And even better still is that the entire setup is then wrapped with a metal mesh and then wrapped again with a resin mesh to give added durability.
In theory, this should make it an even cleaner signal. But can this cause the data to travel faster than in a normal cable? To find out, I performed a couple of tests so that we could see the answer to the burning question of speed.
Testing
To start off with, we should probably take a look at what well be testing these cables on. Nothing fancy or anything, but here are the base components:
EPoX 8KHA+ AMD Athlon XP 1800+ 512MB Crucial PC2100 DDR Seagate Barracuda IV 40GB Windows XP Professional
Testing will consist of running TCD Labs HD Tach and SiSoft Sandra. Both of these utilities were run while using a normal ATA133 rated ribbon cable and then with the RD3XP cable.
HD Tach
The top result is for the standard ribbon cable and the bottom result is using the RD3XP.
As we can see above, the results in data transfer speeds were a bit faster for the RD3XP cables, but the difference is negligible. This was just a bit surprising since HD Tach works in such a way that it ignores the partitions that have been set up on the drive. In testing in this manner, it also ignores any enhancements and tweaked settings that you may have used within Windows. Lets see if the cables can do any better from within a Windows environment.
SiSoft Sandra 2002 SP1
Again, the ribbon cable is the top result and the RD3XP is the bottom.
OK, now Im seeing a bit better results with the RD3XP cabling. Buffered reads and writes are running nearly the same, but I am now getting an increase with sequential reads and writes and also a total scoring that is over 2,400 points superior to the ribbon cables. This works out to be just a shade over 10% gain in data transfer ratings. Seems that these little cables enjoy the settings that are available under Windows.
