Scrub frozen

[climb2bhi]

It was a cable. All good now.

Thanks.

 

[rogerh]

Why do internal PC cables fail? Is it because they are designed for few insertions, and by a technician, but people treat them like 'consumer' leads with moulded cable retention and robust connectors and pull them out by the cable rather than the connector? Or are they just low quality? Can one get better made (as opposed to expensive and gold plated) ones? It seems a shame that cable failure is not a rarity.

 

[Ericloewe]

Why do internal PC cables fail? Is it because they are designed for few insertions, and by a technician, but people treat them like 'consumer' leads with moulded cable retention and robust connectors and pull them out by the cable rather than the connector? Or are they just low quality? Can one get better made (as opposed to expensive and gold plated) ones? It seems a shame that cable failure is not a rarity.

The most common problem seems to be a cable that's slightly loose - that's why many recommend latching SATA cables.

Typically, cables rarely develop faults when left alone. When manipulated, the risk of damage does increase.

 

[solarisguy]

Not all the disk models and SATA cards/motherboard have latchable SATA ports, though...

 

[cyberjock]

Well, the SATA spec dictates something like 50 operations for a connector. So if you plug in a hard drive and then unplug it 20 minutes later that counts as 2 operations. So you can see that you can jump through 50 operations rather quickly.

As for locking mechanisms I hate them. Not all devices and not all motherboards work with them properly. There are quite a few motherboards and quite a few hard drives that actually won't stay connected "well" if you are using a locking device. So while some people are heavily recommending them I don't. If you are doing things properly (like shutting down your server before opening the cover and such) then nothing should be gained from locking devices. Being that I've seen 3 hardware RAID arrays fail completely because of locking devices I refuse to use cables with locking devices.

Most of the time SATA cables are built by the lowest bidder. The cable should be thick and feel "meaty" but many cables I get from Newegg just don't have that kind of quality in them. Honestly the best cables I get seem to always come from buying motherboards as opposed to Newegg, Monoprice, or Amazon.