Thanks. What I'm experiencing is devices (drives) disappearing, and I've read many posts in various places expressing similar experiences. So I'm upgrading my humbs and drive enclosures (hopefully) to improve power distribution.
And at the same time, I remember when the Comcast installer changed one cable, from the wall to the decoder box, and we experienced a 2dB signal improvement instantly. So it occurs to me that buying better-shielded USB cables, at least for the external drives, might bring some noticeable benefit in reliability and performance. Hence my inquiry.
I phoned Belkin, their GOLD USB cable products have, as the name implies, gold-plated connectors but no added shielding. So I'm not sure that's the ticket.
I also phoned Cables-To-Go about their Ultima USB cable line. These have gold-plated connectors AND they claim:
"The USB 2.0 cable is double-shielded with a dual foil and braid. A metal shield surrounds the connector, while a solder-to-connector shell and cable braid create an end-to-end shielding solution for a noise-free connection."
This sounds wonderful, of course, except that I really lack the knowledge to discern whether it means much or not. They use 22 AWG wire, I've seen from San