STP cables

Proper grounding is always a huge issue. In most cases in commercial buildings it is not possible to correctly ground shielded cable system, therefore making the additional costs of STP (or ScTP to that matter) un-justifiable.

Then there's no reason to use STP. UTP works fine over that span and one would hope that there were no significant sources of RF interference in your server room.

This is only going to be used in a server room where the servers and Switched hub is within 30 feet or less.

Barry

Other than cost and reduced cabling flexibility, I don't see any issues. The biggest technical problem for STP is ground differential and there shouldn't be any inside that single room.

As a general rule, STP isn't needed except in very electrically noisy/high RF environments. Or highly EMI sensitive areas. It is mostly used in Europe to avoid EMI certification requirements on UTP.

-- Robert

We noticed that our backups that are done to a backup server improved by 2 hours ( dropped from 12 to 10 hours) after replacing the UTP 5e with STP 5e. We were thinking of extending the replacements to all the servers.

Barry

You might instead want to find out what was wrong with the UTP cable you were using and make sure that the others are not broken in the same manner. You're simply not going to get that kind of packet loss out of 30 feet of properly assembled CAT5E.

Are you sure you had good UTP and not field crimped jobs?

-- Robert

I have had defective commercially produced cables, too.

Maybe the wires in the connector don't make good enough contact, you just never know why it doesn't work.

The important thing is to throw them away when you find them, so that you don't have to track them down again. Even better, cut off the ends so no-one else tries to reuse them.

Even Cat 3 cable would be very unlikely to fail over

-- glen

-- glen

Agreed. More often as opens/intermittants. This particular slowness -- 12h iso 10h just sounds too much like a split pair.

And BY FAR the number one cause of split pairs is newbies with crimpers. Sort of like the old "Beware of programmers who carry screwdrivers". I use T-568A vs -B as a Rumplestiltskin test.

-- Robert