 SATA cables. Something you rarely think about, but today's test is going to be, in my opinion, pretty interesting because I recently had a SATA cable die on me. It was one of these ancient DFI LAN party ones that I've kept around because they're awesome and they're UV yellow and stuff. Not this one, it was a different one. So it occurred to me that there's probably different stages of failure-ness in a particular cable. Maybe there is, maybe there isn't. I know DVI cables, they work or they don't. Whereas VGA cables, there's a wide spectrum of quality in terms of the signal that they can transmit. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take four different SATA cables, including this is an Intel one right here with proper locking connectors on both sides. I'm going to take an older style one with no locking connectors. I'm going to take a long cable. There you go. That's a significantly longer cable. I'm going to take another Intel one, although a different style without locking connectors. And then I'm going to just take some random, the cheapest feeling one I could find. And then what I'm going to do is run the AS SSD benchmark a number of times on the drive. First with the original cable, which I'm going to use as my sort of assumed fine cable. It's an Intel cable made by BizLink. There you go. BizLink, something like that. You can see that. There you go. And then I saw I run it a few times to make sure I get consistent results. And then I'm going to go ahead and start swapping cables and see what kind of results I get. Stay tuned guys. My control tests are all run. So this is, this is pretty representative of what we get with the Intel cable. Now let's start running some of the other cables. I'm going to start with the long Foxconn cable. I've been asked any number of times to explain the difference, especially when they're included with motherboards, between SATA 6 gigabit per second cables. I'm really not sure if you guys can read that or not. Well, it says SATA 6 gigabit per second and the SATA 2, 3 gigabit per second cables that are included with motherboards. And based on the results that I'm getting with this particular cable compared to the ones that I've already run, which are the Intel cable, the Foxconn long cable, and the old crappy DFI cable, it looks like the answer is what I suspected all along, but never had any empirical data to prove. Looks like we're going to end up with pretty much identical results. So I'll show you guys the final ones, but yet this is an unexpected addition to the test that I hadn't thought of doing before. Well, I finished my last test, so this means that the results that I have are pretty much final. So like I said, this is pretty much what I figured would happen. These first four are actually all the Intel cable just for me to run some tests back to back to figure out what the consistency of results was going to be like. So you can see the overall benchmark score. So we're going to call these four scores sort of our margin of error. So anywhere from 470 to 464 will be considered to be a sort of consistent benchmark score with our control group. So here's the long cable, the first run, the long cable, the second run. So I stopped doing two runs per cable when I realized how close together results were going to be. Here's the old crappy DFI cable. Here is the ASUS 6 gigabit per second specific cable. Here is the red generic cable. So what did we learn today, folks? As long as your SATA cable works, it seems to pretty much work. That is not to say that cables cannot be defective. I do have defective SATA cables that don't work at all and cause glitchy behavior, but that's pretty rare. I've only had about two or three SATA cables die on me in the years that SATA has been a relevant standard. So I think that pretty much covers it. Thank you for checking out this little episode on Linus Tech Tips about SATA cables. Exciting topic. Don't forget to subscribe for more unboxings, reviews, and other computer videos about SSDs like this one or the cable that plugs into it.