Do they make the signal faster?
What could they be protecting the signal from?
Why do only some USB cables have them?
Do they really work?
In: Technology
They are what is known as “ferrite chokes”. When there is a fast-rising spike in electricity, often caused by static electricity, the spike generates magnetism in the ferrite core, before it enters the device and caused errors.
The core cannot absorb the energy of a large spike, however. For that you need input protection diodes. It just “takes the edge off it”, making the spike more rounded, less abrupt, which means that it doesn’t create electric noise inside the device.
Input protection in devices had got much better lately, so the choked are generally only seen on older cakes, or very sensitive or safety critical devices such as medical equipment.
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