Akasa Serial ATA / SAS cable

-----| Reason for purchase |-----

I had just bought two Maxtor Maxline III 250GB drives and needed some SATA cables to attach them to my computer. These were very reasonably priced, i think somewhere around £1 - 2 which was cheaper than a normal non UV reactive cable. No brainer to buy these over the others.

-----| Length 45 cm |-----

For my midi case (Thermaltake Tsunami Dream) these were more than long ...
...the SATA ports on my motherboard (Abit KV8 MAX3). Even if your hard drives were near opposite ends of the case this length of cable would be satisfactory.

If you have a server case of a particularly large midi case (my Thermaltake is one of the biggest so this is more for the server case people) you may want to buy the 60 cm or 100 cm versions of this product.

-----| Glow |-----

Ok lets get this out the ... more

-----| Reason for purchase |-----

I had just bought two Maxtor Maxline III 250GB drives and needed some SATA cables to attach them to my computer. These were very reasonably priced, i think somewhere around £1 - 2 which was cheaper than a normal non UV reactive cable. No brainer to buy these over the others.

-----| Length 45 cm |-----

For my midi case (Thermaltake Tsunami Dream) these were more than long enough, as the hard drive bay is right next to the SATA ports on my motherboard (Abit KV8 MAX3). Even if your hard drives were near opposite ends of the case this length of cable would be satisfactory.

If you have a server case of a particularly large midi case (my Thermaltake is one of the biggest so this is more for the server case people) you may want to buy the 60 cm or 100 cm versions of this product.

-----| Glow |-----

Ok lets get this out the way, these do not glow like they do in the advertisement image. Pure and simply do not, the photograph is either Photoshoped or over exposed etc. They do however give off a pleasant glow, but totally over powered by every other glowing product in my case. As shown in this image.

http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/9452/glowoy9.jpg

These cables are available, according to the packaging, in three different colours;

UV Green
UV Blue
UV Orange

so there is a good chance one of these will suit your pc colour scheme.

-----| Performance |-----

These cables come packed in a case and folded up in a concertina fashion, pretty standard way to pack cables. However I’ve been told that SATA cables core can be broken from harshly bending it. The box for this product is quite small, the cable is packed in, so this could lead to it being faulty, which is what i suspect has happened to mine.

When i first installed the hard drives in RAID 0 i would get a message telling me there was an error with the set up and the computer simply wouldn’t boot. Turning the computer on and off would usually solve this, however sometimes it wouldn’t. I took the side of the case off and made sure the cables were attached correctly and they were, during the check i had moved the cables to a different position and then the computer booted first time. When the problem came back a few weeks later i tried straightening out the cables as much as possible, as they were still bent from the packaging, and since then i will only get the problem once in a couple of months or longer. So make sure when these are installed that you keep them as straight as possible with no sharp corners.

-----| Conclusion |-----

Cheap affordable cables, but expect them to have a few minor problems, so far they haven’t caused me a serious error (1 year of use). Don’t expect them to glow as much as the image shows but they are better looking than standard black cables.

I would recommend this product because they are cheap and haven’t caused any major problems but if you require a rock solid system and cannot afford any risks to data loss these aren’t for you. 

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