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SATA faults?
Slimy38 - 27/10/13 at 04:27 PM

I'm after a bit of advice from the techies here. A while back I got the first signs of a hard drive failing. Basically on a cold PC it would work fine, but when it warmed up it would disappear. So I swapped it out.

Then I got similar signs, and it looked to be the SATA port. So having a few spares I did a move about and all seemed good again.

Now I've got another hard drive failure (I can read but not write to the drive), and with another bit of swapping it appears to be the cable itself. But thinking about it, this cable has actually been the common theme throughout.

I'm swapping all the SATA cables anyway, they all have a bit of a chequered history from their birth in a sweatshop in China, so I like the idea of removing at least one suspect. But out of the SATA chain (hard drive, cable and motherboard) what is more likely to fail?

And does anyone recommend a hard drive stress tool so I can see if changing the cables eliminates the heat issue?

MikeRJ - 27/10/13 at 05:08 PM

I have had far more reliability problems with SATA cables than I ever did with the old IDE cables.

Slimy38 - 27/10/13 at 05:24 PM

quote:
Originally posted by MikeRJ
I have had far more reliability problems with SATA cables than I ever did with the old IDE cables.


I'd agree with that, the only IDE failure I had was when I put a screwdriver through one!! The SATA ones seem so much more flimsy, they don't even seem to stay in the socket very well. I've ordered ones with the locks on the connectors, I think it's part of the SATA 3 specification?

gremlin1234 - 27/10/13 at 08:14 PM

check the powers supply (psu)

ironside - 31/10/13 at 12:42 PM

The disk itself stores SMART data about the state of the drive that may help you.

There's a few utilities that will read this, for Windows a reasonable free one is GSmartControl which you can download here:
http://prdownload.berlios.de/gsmartcontrol/gsmartcontrol-0.8.7.exe?download

Right click/View details on the drive in question then click View details then the Attributes tab.
Depending on the disk you'll get different data but I'd say a non-zero raw value for "Reallocated sector count" indicates a failing drive and is not likely to be because of the cable.

My disk also shows "UDMA CRC Error Count". A high number here would suggest an interface problem rather than disk surface. There's a good explanation for most of the attributes if you hover your mouse over them.

Cheers,
Simon.