I just bought a solid state external hard drive, but the USB cable that came with it is only about 1 foot long.

I have a USB cable that came with a digital camera I bought years ago that seems to work fine on the solid state hard drive, but I'm a little confused about a pair of "cylinders" molded into the camera cable. There is a "cylinder" similar to those shown below a few inches from each end of the cable, and I don't know whether for data transfer between the hard drive and the computer, it would be better to have a cable with those cylinders or without.



I've seen these cylinders on USB cables before, but ONLY on USB cables meant for connecting a digital camera to a computer. USB cables meant for connecting other USB peripherals to a computer don't seem to have them.

Does anyone know what these "cylinders" are called and what they do?

I'm wanting a top quality USB cable for this solid state drive, and I don't want to use my old camera cable if those cylinders are going to introduce errors or something in the data being sent between the computer and the solid state drive.

Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.