Sata Cables

March 10, 2015

I have been looking a bit more into sata cables and just wanted to find out a bit more in terms of their performance since my new motherboard includes two with the 6Gbs labels on it. I went to the local stores and found a few but most if not all were not actually labelled on the cables themselves. So I was just curious about this since I also want to get some shorter cables, but that seems a bit hard to find for some odd reason. My cases are small and use mini itx boards so I really don't need the long cables. I also need a one or two righ angle versions. In any case I found this article about cables. However, I guess it depends on what the cable is being used for.

Take cat5/6/7 network cables for example. Yes, all of these cables physically exist now. I have installed cat 5 and cat 6 myself, and just held the cat 7 at at store the other day. I also spoke with an engineer about network cables once and I was also shown some of their cable testing areas/machines, so I agree that not all cables are created equal and that can make a huge difference. But then again I like to look a these sort of thing since this is the backbone of your information. Most people don't even think about this stuff.

In any case, I would really prefer the motherboard manufacturers included as many cables as the board has ports so that you don't have to go looking and matching or mismatching cables.

http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/SATA-3Gb-s-vs-6Gb-s-Cable-Performance-Revisited-183/

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/your_sata_cable_slowing_down_your_data_transfers_max_pc_investigates 

Here's the difference in sata speeds.
http://kb.sandisk.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/8142/~/difference-between-sata-i,-sata-ii-and-sata-iii
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA

My new motherboard came with these nicely labelled sata cables.

 The blue is a new monoprice right angle cable I just got and it's not labelled.

They both have the metal clips that hold the cable in and I didn't have any of this type and really like the built in clips now. The monoprice is also a bit longer as you can see which also made for a more painful install in my mini itx case. So this also makes a difference as I just found out.


Here are a few variations of these network cables. As you can see all cables are not created equal.