Jonathan,

quoted

The ONLY reason that I can think of to use round cables would be for
looks.  From a performance or reliability standpoint, they are a waste of
money.  I routinely build systems with dual 8-channel IDE RAID cards
(3Ware 7500-8) and 16 disks, and ONLY use flat cables.

I use rounded cables in my case for a few reasons:
- The distance between my promise and my drives is small yet the promise
cables are long, the rounded cables I have are 12" long and fit very neatly
- The promise cables had two IDE connectors but I only wanted to put one
drive per channel; the rounded cables are single cables
- Air flow; because of my small casing the flat promise cables were
contricting the airflow quite a bit, the rounded less
- flexibility; I found the flat cables hard to bend in to place whereas the
round cables you could twist easily

I've added a link which should make it clear that rounded cables in my case
are a benefit to me. What I was worried about was that they could be
inferior quality and thus be a factor in my raid performance.

http://www.datzegik.com/DSC00056.JPG

Check out 'http://www.accs.com/p_and_p/TeraByte/cables.html', to see why
round cables are not needed.  Careful cable routing can easilly overcome
the issues you have.  When you have a large number of cables, the flat
cables can stack, but the round cables just make a big bundle.

Also, 3Ware sells 80-conductor/40-pin cables with two connectors in 18",
24" and 36" lengths.

I've built systems in cases that are similar to yours (Antec or Chen-Ming)
with similar numbers of drives, and had no problems with flat cables to
five disks, a CDROM drive and a floppy drive.

Good luck.
				Peter Ashford