In my experience, I've found no difference at all between the free USB cable that came with a drive and a $200, all-silver "fancy" one from an expensive cable company. But, that's running from a Mini to an asynchronous USB DAC. Asynchronous is meant to be "more immune" (whatever that means) to cable quality due to the way, or more like where (ie, in the DAC, after the cable has done its job) it handles jitter issues. I have also read that cable quality can matter more if running USB 2.0, rather than 1.1. But, here, the "quality" can be inverted. USB 2.0 runs at 40x the bandwidth of 1.1. Hand made, bespoke, expensive USB cables -- sometimes -- are simply not technically up to the task of operating at the required tolerances, while computer/robot manufactured, cheap, high production run cables are designed to do precisely that. There was a time that at least some DAC manufacturers were affirmatively warning customers away from "high end" USB cables for 2.0 for just this reason. Think Ayre still does. Expect that this technology gap is shrinking in the shops hoping to charge a lot for "audio grade" USB cables, but it's tough to imagine how that gets done other than, at least at some level, repurposing computer-designed and manufactured wires. But that's a guess. All that said, I'd expect the cable to matter even less between the drive and the CPU. There, I'd guess it's purely binary (pun intended): either adequate bandwidth or not. You can send your bits in as fancy a wrapper as you want, but I suspect the CPU sees the same bits either way. (Put differently, I'd guess that the time and processing spent by whatever software chews up and spits out the bits in the CPU effectively renders the means by which the bits arrived there in the first place -- be it the wire from an internal drive or the wire from an external drive -- largely irrelevant, particularly if you are buffering and playing out of RAM in the first place.) Anyway, my experience for what it's worth.
