Fake wire gauge

[Behemot]

Not that I am that surprised, but just noticed while cutting of some SATA cabling from dead crappy PSUs for making molex-to-dual-SATA adapters, they are not satisfied with using small wire gauge, they even fake it on top of that.

Had one very thin set which made me curious if that's even gonna be enough for two drives (I'll likely use it just for SSDs I guess) but it states 20AWG on the insulation. Than another one also 20AWG but by eye-meter at least one third thicker, if not twice the gauge, this is surely genuine 20AWG.

So if you see very thin cables next time, check if the spec on it is not faked

[Pentium4]

Wow... there is no corner that they won't cut. Do you have any pictures? What brand were the PSUs with the fake gauge that you've come across so far?

[Behemot]

too lazy too take pictures, it's very thin so phone's out of question lol

this particular piece was Evolve (local brand which takes whatever they can find), still some old half-bridge crap with likely faked PFC coil too

[lti]

I saw this in the goofy power supply included with my Vantec CB-ISA225-U3 IDE/SATA to USB bridge. That is only for temporary use with a 12V 2A power supply and a 5V DC-DC converter with a 2A rated chip (TD1410), so it isn't a big deal.

[eccerr0r]

How low can they go...wow.

And 20AWG wire is not that thick to begin with... that's pretty thin already. 22AWG is too thin IMHO except for single SSDs probably. For things like CPU and possibly even hard disk power cable I'd want at least 18AWG...

But still might want to pull it through a strip gauge to make sure however, thicker insulation does sort of give an optical illusion the wire is thinner. Also stranded/solid can fool the eye as well.

I'm surprised, thought wire was gauged with mm² instead of AWG outside of the USA. AWG, like feet and gallons is a USA thing, I thought. Unfortunately this is one of those things I can't easily convert AWG to mm² and have to look up, so nobody give me mm² wire specs and expect me to know what you're talking about right away

[Behemot]

never seen any ATX PSU cabling gauged otherwise than AWG, guess it has to do with ATX spec?

I've soldered these so the difference surely is there; actually cut the true 20AWG from that maxpower or rexpower or which PoS it was, if you remember those units which had only like 2/3 of the depth of ordinary ATX PSU? The insulation is thicker sure but the copper inside is as well.

This Evolve thing cabling made me curious even before I cut it, the wiring is very thin, you can see it right away that something is strange there. And I found the reason obviously. Would guesstimate the real gauge to be 22 AWG at the best

[eccerr0r]

True that the ATX spec came from Intel, but I'd think everything would try to be metric-ized and not deal with weird USA units like miles or pounds...

Ultimately have to measure voltage drop to see if something is acceptable or not...hard to do in circuit. Sigh.

Would be nice to see photograph of printing on the jacket just for grins...

[Behemot]

OK, nevermind. Looks like I'm a douche

Went to check the adapters I've soldered to maybe take a photo. I've noticed only now that the max/rex/whatever-power has 20AWG wires, but only splitting from the first SATA connector to the second. Up to the first one from the board, it is 18AWG! Totaly missed it. So that's why it felt thicker While the Evolve has only 20AWG everywhere.

Sorry for misleading ya and time to apologise to that Evolve unit (not that it's not a gutless wonder otherwise ).

[stj]

they need to scrap "WG" numbers and go to mm-squared.

and by "WG" i mean both AWG and SWG.

[eccerr0r]

Then again I would not be very happy with wires that use a whole bunch of significant digits to accurately specify a wire... like if I needed to specify 0.519mm^2 I think I'd rather specify 20AWG...

What would one do with 0.5mm^2 wire in this case... was this supposed to be 20AWG?