• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

Round Cable and Raid?

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.

GooeyGUI

New Member
Joined
Dec 17, 2002
Location
Salem, Oregon
I have room for six HD drives. I have on-board RAID for two drives that I want for video capture and editing. Then I have two drives for OS/Apps & Data.

I've used red spiral loom for wiring. These are red rounded cables to the two drives already installed. It's going to look pretty busy with another cable, but I suppose it's better than a ribbon.

The main question I have is this, "If I run RAID 0 will the errors induced by the round cable cause problems?" If not what are some of the better cables out there?

:confused:
 
running raid-0 on round cables right now with no probs from the cables
 
theres a problem with rounded cables and raid? since when?

ran RAID 0 with rounded cables fine for a while...still got cables, just no more raid cause RAID 0 is very bad :)
 
Raid 0 rocks if set up properly with quality drives. Or get Win2K server and set yourself up a Raid 5 array with up to 10 HD's if I remember right. Not quite as fast as Raid 0 but has parity so you can rebuild data.
 
I think the reason he is wondering if it would be better/worse to use a ribbon is becasue I THINK in some home made cable cutting u can accidentally cut into the metal wiring and data corruption/loss could happen, and in RAID i dont think that would be a good thing...of course if ur very careful with doing that stuff, u dont have to worry :)

'Bump
 
Actually the primary reason people worry about using rounded cables (and their worries have merrit) is because of the wonderful effect of electromagnets. Any conductive material, while current is passed through it, is an electromagnet. Also, a wire without current which has an electromagnetic current near it will generate a current, albiet quite small. (Ever try running a magnet over a coil of wire hooked to a really sensitive voltmeter? :) )

Anywho, as of the UDMA 66 standard, all the IDE cables went from 40 to 80 conductor. Every other wire in an 80 conductor cable is hooked directly to ground. They did this to try and curb the amount of electromagnetic interference from one wire to the next.

The problem is that rounded cables still have all these grounding wires, but they're no longer in any particular order. When all the wires are in a flat cable thus a horizontal line (IE data-ground-data-ground-etc), ideally the majority of the electromagnetic field created by a data wire would be absorbed by the ground wire next to it before it hit another data wire, thus potentially corrupting data. Rounded cables don't have this nice benefit, and there will be more than a few places in the cable where a data wire is right next to another data wire.

At one point or another, I found an article describing how to kill an IBM hard drive. Rounded cables and removable drive cages were at the top. Despite my searching I couldn't find it, but Lost Circuits partially conferms my suspicions about rounded cables in this article.

Not that we should all stop using rounded cables in normal operation - the data error rate is a lot higher, but as most of us have found, our hard drives still last pretty long. It is something to consider, especially if you're intending to use a RAID-0 array. As we all know, RAID-0 pretty much the least stable way to run hard disks in the first place, so adding another layer of instabiltiy (rounded cables) on top, however minor it is, may bug some people enough to never use 'em. I do use them, and they've never given me any hassle, but my server has flat cables all the way. Something to ponder.

PS: Stay away from the removable drive racks at all costs ^_^
From Lost Circuits article above
We tested several of these devices with the IBM 60GXP and the unfortunate result was that not a single drive survived in the removable rack for more than a few hours.
 
OCOW said:
Raid 0 rocks if set up properly with quality drives. Or get Win2K server and set yourself up a Raid 5 array with up to 10 HD's if I remember right. Not quite as fast as Raid 0 but has parity so you can rebuild data.

RAID 0 is crap no matter what the setup, RAID 0, RAID 0+1 and RAID 5 are ten times better, even though more expensive
Cause with RAID 0 you are twice as likely to lose your data to hard drive issues.
 
pik4chu said:


RAID 0 is crap no matter what the setup, RAID 0, RAID 0+1 and RAID 5 are ten times better, even though more expensive
Cause with RAID 0 you are twice as likely to lose your data to hard drive issues.

ok, you are correct that raid 0 is not good for important data, but for raw speed it can not be beat.

also in your post you say raid 0 is bad, but raid 0 is better then raid 0 ? i got confused, i wonder if you ment raid 1 or raid 3 maybe
?

and my captur drive for video and pic working, is set up in raid 0, once i get it on off of the camera, i then move it to the raid 5 setup that i do all of my work on, but i also have my swap files and photochop work files on the raid 0 setup. that way if i have a hard drive fail, i do not loose any importand information. but thats the point of a back up.
 
Level 0: Provides data striping (spreading out blocks of each file across multiple disks) but no redundancy. This improves performance but does not deliver fault tolerance. *This is where the speed from RAID 0 kicks in, no ERC.
Level 1: Provides disk mirroring. *Good for important Data but not for speed*
Level 3: Same as Level 0, but also reserves one dedicated disk for error correction data. It provides good performance and some level of fault tolerance. *I ran this one on a school server while in college and I could not tell that I had any performance loss at all.*
Level 5: Provides data striping at the byte level and also stripe error correction information. This results in excellent performance and good fault tolerance. *While running this one in college we actually had some lag points in the system we think because we were using several different types of SCSI cards, we are not sure. We were using Wide SCSI, FAST SCSI, UltraWide SCSI. *


I personally use the Maxtor add-on card for Raid. It is used with two drives and both are 133 compliant and run extremely well with the card. Not as good as serial ATA but without all the bugs. BTW I am using one WD and one Maxtor drive one each on individual channels. All my drives have 133 rounded cables and I suffer no problems from this.

I use a small 13GB to back up my system files and run a 120GB secondary drive with 4 partitions for all my non-OS data, one 40GB drive for my music and a 30GB primary for the OS and programs that will not let me install them anywhere else.
 
Last edited:
as for the question of a decent quality round cable...i was directed to coolermaster for the best quality. the same person has recently told me to keep the flat cables, and forget the round ones....but, if i was going to insist on buying them, i should go with cooler master.

as for the idea of raid 0, and is it any good...well, i have had an issue with my one drive, and the issue is still there btw......but, with any possible problems, i find myself reinstalling windows very often due to this problem. i am on 2 single hdd's at the moment, on ide1, to ensure the problem wasn't the raid ide's.

raid 0 is twice as fast as a single hdd, and that's no lie.....but as mentioned above...your info and installed data is twice as vulnerable to errors.

i have a problem with a drive, and that has caused me to reinstall windows.....and lose data i didn't have backed up......more than 20 times this past month.

last night i switched to 2 singles, and it's much slower, but every time the slave drive has a problem, i have to format it, and so on...but my main drive is secure, and working properly, so, my data is safe and sound.

when the raid seemed to work fine, i would preach how i would never live without it, but it has taken it's toll on me with each installation.

raid 0 is neither right or wrong....it's a risk though......lol......;)
 
Back