[Discuss] USB Cables (was Debian 11 -> 12)

[markw at mohawksoft.com (markw at mohawksoft.com)]

> On 5/30/24 14:25, Rich Pieri wrote:
>> They were adamant that there was something wrong with their
>> device, but we finally convinced them to replace the cable.
>
> Yes, I have on occasion connected drives using a??converter to connect
> old USB to USB-C, that doesn't make a tight connection, and with a
> little wiggle it disconnects. Good cables matter.

I have some really really nice looking thick and heavy duty cables, yet
crap. You can never know. Like I said in an earlier post, some cables are
basically designed for power.

I've had good luck with short USB-3 to SATA cables for RPI[3/4/5] and my
ubuntu desktop. My USB drive enclosure has a USB-3 to USB-C cable that
works, but I thought my aforementioned really really nice looking cable
would be better. It wasn't. The zpool I created would always get checksum
errors and scrub would always find more. Changed the cable, viola! worked
like a champ.

I'm really quite surprised that the cables can be that bad. Oddly enough,
the RPI seems to do better with USB than my desktop.

>
>
> In this case I'm using those nice thick cables that came with the little
> portable WD drives I am using, short USB-C to USB-C, including using the
> converters that came with them to plug into an old type USB jack on the
> powered hub. To the connect to the Pi I use a longer, also heavy cable
> that I think came with the hub.
>
> This hardware worked on my laptop, worked on PI 4 with slow USB, and
> currently works great on Pi 4 with Linux SW raid 1.

Personally, I will never use linux raid again. It's not that it is a bad
technology, but it lacks data integrity features you need. In the linux
environment today, I can't think of a better storage system than ZFS,
especially if you value data integrity.