Jonathan, > > The ONLY reason that I can think of to use round cables would be for > > looks. From a performance or reliability standpoint, they are a waste of > > money. I routinely build systems with dual 8-channel IDE RAID cards > > (3Ware 7500-8) and 16 disks, and ONLY use flat cables. > > I use rounded cables in my case for a few reasons: > - The distance between my promise and my drives is small yet the promise > cables are long, the rounded cables I have are 12" long and fit very neatly > - The promise cables had two IDE connectors but I only wanted to put one > drive per channel; the rounded cables are single cables > - Air flow; because of my small casing the flat promise cables were > contricting the airflow quite a bit, the rounded less > - flexibility; I found the flat cables hard to bend in to place whereas the > round cables you could twist easily > > I've added a link which should make it clear that rounded cables in my case > are a benefit to me. What I was worried about was that they could be > inferior quality and thus be a factor in my raid performance. > > http://www.datzegik.com/DSC00056.JPG Check out 'http://www.accs.com/p_and_p/TeraByte/cables.html', to see why round cables are not needed. Careful cable routing can easilly overcome the issues you have. When you have a large number of cables, the flat cables can stack, but the round cables just make a big bundle. Also, 3Ware sells 80-conductor/40-pin cables with two connectors in 18", 24" and 36" lengths. I've built systems in cases that are similar to yours (Antec or Chen-Ming) with similar numbers of drives, and had no problems with flat cables to five disks, a CDROM drive and a floppy drive. Good luck. Peter Ashford - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
