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USB3 Cable to External HDD

I'm hoping this is going be a simple question to answer. I use an external StarTech RAID drive connected to my Linux server. It is formatted HPFS this contains mainly my music for the Logitech Media Server. Very rarely I need to connect this drive to my Windows 7 machine to do some maintenance that through the network is very slow.

The HDD uses a USB3 interface, so to get that extra speed I recently purchased online a USB3 5 metre cable. To put it in a nutshell it does not work. I'm wondering if I'm missing something here. The cable was sold as a printer cable I am presuming there is no difference or could it be the length of the cable. The final thing is did I just simply by a dud cable. I have no other way of testing this with out another USB3 device.

Any USB2 cable that I have works fine with it I was just looking for bit extra speed especially when copying moving around quite large amounts of data.

Thanks,
Robert…

Hi there,

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bob Fletcher (Post 5153257)

[...] The HDD uses a USB3 interface, so to get that extra speed I recently purchased online a USB3 5 metre cable. To put it in a nutshell it does not work. I'm wondering if I'm missing something here. The cable was sold as a printer cable I am presuming there is no difference or could it be the length of the cable.

I'm not sure, but the cable length might in fact be the problem. I don't have any experience with USB3, but for USB2, 5m is the utmost limit that the standard permits. Longer cables may cause signal propagation issues, even though you can buy them here and there, and occasionally people use them successfully. However, it's not guaranteed.

Well, USB3 is ten times faster, so I'd assume that the signal timings are even more crucial there.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bob Fletcher (Post 5153257)

The final thing is did I just simply by a dud cable. I have no other way of testing this with out another USB3 device.

I'd rather say you're working on the edge of reliability, and you've got the bad luck that your configuration tilts a bit more to the "unreliable" side.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Bob Fletcher (Post 5153257)

Any USB2 cable that I have works fine

The long ones, too?

[X] Doc CPU

Thanks for your very quick reply, it is the only device that I had any experience with USB3. I'll see what other people say hopefully I'll get some more replies from some people are actually using USB3 devices and cables. I must say I was a bit disappointed when the cable came because it seems to be a very thin cable compared with my shorter USB3 cable that came with the drive.

Yes I have a USB2 10 metre cable but that has a booster half way along and it works fine it's also quite a heavy substantial cable.

Robert…