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Choosing Direct Attach Cables over Fiber Transceiver – Here’s Why

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angelalee
Choosing Direct Attach Cables over Fiber Transceiver – Here’s Why

Basically driven by the higher speed cables, network cabling has undergone some major changes over the last couple of years. If you might be aware you’d know that the CAT5e copper babbling and 100BASE-T were highly dominant in the data centre interconnection applications for years. However, if you look now the SFP cable is the latest favorite. This direct attach cable can be classified to DAC cable and AOC cable. DAC cable is the most basic form of high speed direct attach cabling.

Despite this clear win that is in the favor of DAC there is still some confusion that remains between Direct Attach Cables and Fiber Transceiver. But, here’s some more detail about them both that might help you understand why choose DAC is always a better choice to make.

Discussing Direct Attach Cables

For brief description, a direct attach copper cable is a kind of fixed high speed copper cable assembly. It consists of a shielded twinax copper cable with some pluggable connectors on either end with varying gauges from 24 to 30 AWG: remember here that the longer the distance, the higher the AWF rating should be.

Generally, according to the construction difference, the DAC cables can be classified into two categories: passive DAC cable and active DAC cable.

Here’s a little more description about the two types:

The passive DAC cables have no electrical components built into the cable assembly; therefore, they have minimal power consumption of no more than 0.15w and generally for short reach up to 7m.

In case of the active DAC cables, these have signal amplification and equalization built into the cable assembly. This assembly allows allows a little longer transmission distance up to 15m and ensures better transmission quality, whereas it has a higher price and consumes more power around 0.5-1w.

Why Choose the DAC Cables over Transceivers?

When choosing between DAC cables and transceivers the confusion is a common thing but if you understand all the important points you will most certainly be able to make the right choice.

Here are some reasons that make the DAC cables a really popular choice so make sure you read carefully about them:

  1. Lower Power Consumption:When compared to the optical transceiver modules, the DAC cables – especially the passive copper cables consume comparatively less power.

 

  1. Lower Price: The DAC cables are always a less costly choice to make because they do not need any patch panels or even the additional cables when connected to the devices as optical transceiver modules.

 

  1. Simpler Deployment: A really important advantage that comes with choosing the DAC cables is that they have only one component that needs to be interconnected. However, in case of the optical transceiver it needs to be connected with more devices, all of which need to be matched with each other. Besides this, the use of DAC cables turns out to be more convenient for the installers as they do not need to clean and inspect the optical fiber before plugging in the cables.

Here’s a quick conclusion:

As per all the details that have been mentioned above for your clear understanding, it is absolutely clear that the DAC cables are any day a better choice to make over the fiber optics cable. Undoubtedly, the DAC cable is an absolutely ideal high-speed solution for data center interconnections and should be your primary choice here.

Hope this information helps you!

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