That’s not to say they can’t work beyond this – but that they were never designed for any more and could become unreliable for a number of reasons (e.g. It should be noted, such SATA connectors aren’t designed for continuous unplugging and re-plugging, with a cycle rating of about 50. In this case, replacing the cable solved the problem once and for all. This meant that the connector was probably not putting as much pressure on the spring contacts and this resulted in intermittent contact. At first, I thought it was something wrong with the CPU, RAM, motherboard or power supply, until I noticed the HDD light being solid and the interface CRC error counts (not all drives have this SMART attribute).Īs it turns out, this second case was one where the plastic “shell” of the connector that hugs around the drive’s “tongue” had deformed over time and bowed into a bit of a D-shape, instead of being a square “box”. The system was a bit of an intermittent booter, with the occasional hang. This was one of them, which makes for an easy fix. Earlier SATA cables did not have a captive tab to keep them locked in place and some connectors do not have the necessary holes for such tabs to engage. This can happen because of the residual stress in a SATA cable pulling on the connection and a slight bump (e.g. The first was the simplest – a case of a drive not detecting at all which was tracked down to a SATA cable coming “undone” from the motherboard side. This month, I’ve actually been plagued by four SATA cable “failures” of sorts. Unfortunately, they are not without their occasional issues. Compared to the 40-pin, 80-conductor IDE cables that came before them, SATA connections are so much easier to deal with, being point-to-point with no configuration required and using much less insertion force. The thin “liquorice strap” twinaxial cables with a rectangular cross section, frequently pinky-red in colour but sometimes grey or blue, are a common sight. For the most part, we are starting to say goodbye to SATA on most modern computers, although it is still the primary means for hard drives and older SSDs to connect.

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