Data Cable Used at Home and in Business

Data Cable Used at Home and in Business

With the demands of modern life increasingly reliant upon technology it is vitally important to get the best equipment, as cheap as possible. Not only that but as consumers, we should try and get as much value for our money by getting the most out of our equipment. Having the appropriate data cable is all part of this process and applies equally to large businesses and individual PC owners.

There are various different types of data cable in use such as the Coaxial Cable, which is perhaps the most popular form of cabling as it is cheap and quite flexible. The Coaxial Cable is made of up a central copper wire surrounded by an insulator and a braided metal shield. The shield means it can be used over long distances at high speed, but the cable is usually only used for basic installations.

 

Another type is a twisted-pair cable, which consists of two copper strands woven into a braid and covered with insulation. It is suitable for a local network with a few nodes, a limited budget and simple connectivity. The drawback is that over long distances at high data rates it does not guarantee data integrity.

Increasingly popular are fiber optic cables as they are lightweight, can accommodate a large bandwidth of up to several gigahertz and are immune to noise. These cables are very secure and allow connections over long distances. That said it is more expensive than Coaxial and twisted-pair cables and is therefore not ideal local network connections.

 

Many of are using our PCs at home not just for working on spreadsheets and playing the occasional game of minesweeper, but also as part of our home entertainment system. When buying a new hard disk drive or HD DVD, Blu-ray, DVD or CD drive for your computer it is important to choose the most appropriate Serial ATA (SATA) data cable to connect the drive to the motherboard securely allowing for a direct path without bending the data cable too much. SATA is a single cable with a minimum of four wires creating a point-to-point connection between devices with transfer rates for SATA beginning at 150MBps.

SATA data cables are much thinner than the old IDE cable drive and can be up to one metre in length. There are two-speed levels too with SATA hitting up to 1.5 Gb/s and SATA II up to 3 Gb/s. In reality, these types of speed are not reachable as it depends on the capacity of the computer.

There are various different types of SATA available:

• Straight Both Ends SATA Cable - This is the most commonly used as it has the same straight connectors at both ends and is the cheapest available. It is not ideal though if there is a large obstruction between the drive and the motherboard as it does not bend easily.

• Straight Both Ends with Latches SATA Cable - This is the same as above but provides a more secure connection. The latch holds the data cable in place so it doesn't get easily pulled out.

• Right Angled Drive Connector SATA Cable - This cable connector points downwards and is ideal for drives mounted higher up. However, it would be no good for drives near the bottom of a case or on the floor.

• 270 Degree Drive Connector SATA Cable - Conversely this cable points upwards and therefore would suit drives near the bottom of a case and not those on top of a case or shelf.

Data cables can be a real headache for businesses as their data centres try to keep up with modern technology and the growing traffic from the Internet, Smartphones and business applications. The numerous cables required to connect all the machines in data centres can cause huge costs to businesses as well as being an administrative nightmare. A typical computer server now requires at least eight or nine cables for tasks that should only need two connections and if you multiply that by the hundreds of servers in major data centres it can really get out of hand.

Many companies are forced to buy extra equipment to manage all the necessary connections and coupled with the valuable office space this uses, it is costing a lot of money. In fact, experts believe that as much as 15 per cent of the cost of data equipment is spent on cabling. One of the solutions is to consolidate data cables if by moving to Ethernet, which has become the primary type of data cable linking almost all Internet-based networks, including the largest and most demanding telecommunications systems in the world.

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