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traceroute66 | on: WhatCable: Know what your USB-C cable can do
> I'm using the hardware tester from $INSERT_NAME_HERE

Oh god not again... before everyone starts naming their favourite brand, here's a 265 comment HN thread[1] (from last week !) on why these cheap USB-cable "testers" are not worth anything.

TL;DR You need a six-figure wallet to seriously call anything a "hardware tester" for USB cables. User ChrisMarshallNY has a one-liner summary buried in that thread:

    Think about it. You need to generate a precise, calibrated, 40GHz signal, transmit it, then precisely measure the returned signal for phase, amplitude, and waveform integrity -at that speed. Oscilloscopes and logic analyzers that run at that speed, are damn expensive.
If you only paid $40 for a black-box on your favourite online marketplace, then what you've got is definitively NOT a USB-cable tester.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49152255

bestouff | parent | next
OK sure your 6 figures thing or even that 20k thing are way better testers than the Treedix. But for my use case, i.e. verify what's actually in the cable (not blindly trusting the marker) the latter is sufficient and very ergonomic, and the "real" testers are overkill.
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PhilipRoman | parent | next
Am I missing something? For practical use you only care if it carries a certain amount of packets per second without excessive retries, not whether it preserves the waveform exactly.
traceroute66 | root | parent
> For practical use you only care if it carries a certain amount of packets per second without excessive retries

The $40 black-boxes do two things:

    1. Basic electrical continuity test
    2. Read the marker chips (if present)
There is zero chance that a $40 black-box, even if it did a naïve packet pushing test, would deliver you reproducible results and introduces all sorts of other random variables.

"Excessive retries" sounds like exactly the sort of intermittent, hard-to-diagnose cable issues that you will not find unless you test the USB cable on a 6-figure rig. :)

lloydatkinson | parent | next
Are you suggesting there is no middle ground and that simply knowing if a USB-C cable is a USB C cable or a fake one can't be done with a cheap tester?
traceroute66 | root | parent
> Are you suggesting there is no middle ground

Sadly yes.

Like many people on that thread concluded:

The best "middle ground" thing you can do is pay a premium to buy your cables from reputable manufacturers.

LoganDark | parent
Huh? Decent quality cable testers can be had for like $20,000. There's a difference between a general-purpose oscilloscope or logic analyzer and a purpose-built domain-specific appliance. I probably could've saved up for one in just a few months back when I had a job earlier this year.
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traceroute66 | root | parent
> Decent quality cable testers can be had for like $20,000.

See the discusison linked to.

Trust me, my interest was piqued by that thread and I went down the rabbit warren with Mr Google and spent far too much time on the subject. I looked at the various manufacturers and the setups required.

TL;DR: To start with, you need fancy harness assemblies. Then you need to plug those harnesses into very, very expensive equipment.

You're not going to find anything for $20k. High-throughput USB-cable testing simply can't be done the same way copper CAT6 certification can with a 20k Fluke.

For those who want to play with Mr Google, some manufacturers from my notes: Wilder Technologies, Allion, Keysight, Tektronix, Teledyne LeCroy

Here's one blog post I uncovered during my researches: https://www.keysight.com/blogs/en/tech/bench/2023/02/17/powe...

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