34 MAXIMUM PC JUNE 2004
EEXPERIMENTS WITHXPERIMENTS WITH
Is It Worth It To Spend
the Extra Money on a
Highfalutin’ USB Cable?
The test: You’ve seen the ads for
so-called “high-speed” USB cables,
but are they any different from their
garden-variety counterparts? Is it
worth the money to buy a cable with
a more promising label or will the
plain-Jane USB cable you have lying
around do the job just fine? This is
what we set out to discover in this
speed trial.
Our first order of business was to
acquire three different USB cables
of varying expense and purported
attributes. The first cable, heretofore
known as the “regular” cable, was
pulled from a tangle of cables we
found in the dark, dusty, nether
regions of the Lab. The second
cable is a brand-new Hi-Speed
USB 2.0 cable. The third cable isa pricier “high-speed” USB cable
made by Monster Cable—pricier,
no doubt, because it offers features
galore, including a “PowerFlow” LED
that flashes when it’s connected.
Impressive, to be sure.
To evaluate differences among the
three cables, we performed a 2GB file
transfer from our test system’s hard
drive to a USB 2.0 backup drive. We
performed the file transfer with each
cable three times and rebooted after
each file transfer. The results posted
here are the average of all three
transfer times for each cable.The results: Well, well, well. It looks
like the fancy-pants cables were just
about the same speed as the older,
supposedly inferior cable. Score one
for the little guy! While the regular
cable was slower than the high-speedcables by a few seconds overall, this
is hardly a night-and-day difference.
And certainly not worth the cost dif-
ferential—a regular USB cable costs
about $3 and the Monster Cable costs
$50. While the difference in speed
between “regular old” USB devices
and the newer spec’d USB 2.0 is irre-
futable, it appears there is little dif-
ference among the USB cables that
carry data to and from those devices.
Except maybe pizzazz. In the Monster
cable’s defense, it dominated in the
benchmark category “Has an LED that
flashes when connected.” And it’s the
only cable we know of that sports a
“Hex Mesh” jacket, “SingleHelix” con-
struction,
and 24-karat gold connectors.
But when it comes to data transfer
rates and integrity, good old-fash-
ioned Joe Cable gets the job done.Can a vanilla USB cable hang with
these fancy cables? We find out.USB BENCHMARKS REGULAR CABLE HI -SPEED USB
2.0 CABLEMONSTER CABLETransfer times (sec) 7:52 7:44 7: