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Comment by gregmac

2 years ago

> This manufacturer claims the cable transmits data at up to 10 Gbps – a speed that corresponds to USB 3.1 Gen 2 – but it only has enough pins and wires to support USB 2.0 at up to 480 Mbps. In any case, this cable accumulated 29 one-star reviews on Amazon and was discontinued the day after we bought it.

Pretty much sums up the experience of buying cables in the past couple years.

25 comments

gregmac

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londons_explore  2 years ago

I really want my computer to have a built in cable tester. Just plug both ends of the same cable into two different ports of a computer, and it has a little popup saying "This cable can support charging at this rate and data at that rate, and is fully functional". Or "This cable has 1 bad pin, and that may affect video/audio/charging/whatever functionality"

Ideally, the computer would test every pin in the cable, and also test the resistance/voltage drop of the cable to detect thinner-than-spec conductors.

I'm pretty sure USB-C hardware in a typical laptop can already do most of this, if only the firmware added support for such testing.

  • izacus  2 years ago

    It's really strange that even getting a separate testing device is really hard. There are some that test pins and some that can read the emarker, but none affordable that can do both.

  • aalimov_  2 years ago

    > I really want my computer to have a built in cable tester. Just plug both ends of the same cable into two different ports of a computer … If you have a Mac you might be able to try the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test app. It would require you to also have a drive that* can handle the read/write speeds of the cable you are testing… but you’ll only get accurate numbers if your drive can handle read/write that’s above what the cable can handle. Hopefully someone else knows of a better way.

    • ricardobeat  2 years ago

      If the computer could test on a loop like the parent comment suggested, every single machine built in the last decade has enough memory bandwidth to test >40Gbps. No need to write to disk.

  • colanderman  2 years ago

    Mikrotik routers have something like this for Ethernet cables. They can detect how far down a cable break is and on what twisted pair. (They don't test cable bandwidth though.)

floatrock  2 years ago

> accumulated 29 one-star reviews on Amazon and was discontinued the day after we bought it.

They forgot to say how it re-appeared the next day under some other manufacturer name that's a random assortment of words and letters slightly different than "NiceTQ"

  • bee_rider  2 years ago

    It is annoying that these sellers do this, but it is a pretty obvious thing to do, it is economically incentivized, and so it is totally unsurprising.

    The weird thing, IMO, is that Amazon doesn’t see this as a big problem that they need to solve.

    I mean if I was to give somebody advice as to which cables they should buy on Amazon, it would have to be: use a brand you know and make sure you buy it directly from their account, and if there’s no such brand, don’t buy a cable from Amazon… but then I guess nobody asks.

    • galaxyLogic  2 years ago

      > The weird thing, IMO, is that Amazon doesn’t see this as a big problem that they need to solve.

      Not so weird I think. They pretty much have a monopoly so what do they care. The more Amazon is used as the sales-channel the more money Amazon makes. And most users don't have a way of testing their cables. If a cable stops working it is easy to assume the user somehow broke the cable or its connectors themselves.

  • kridsdale1  2 years ago

    I swear, there must be software to make pseudo English phoneme strings for Chinese resellers to register as “companies” on amazon. 95% of them are ridiculous and I can’t believe a human made them.