Took me 4 hours to figure out a bad SATA cable was killing my drives

Honestly, I spent most of last Saturday pulling my hair out over this client's PC that kept dropping one of the SSDs randomly. I swapped the drive, checked the motherboard ports, even updated the BIOS thinking it was some weird driver issue. After swapping everything else, I finally noticed the SATA cable had a tiny kink near the connector that was causing intermittent connection loss. Took 4 hours total for something that costs like 5 bucks to fix. Has anyone else dealt with a cable that looked fine but was actually bad?

3 comments

3 Comments

pat_moore11d ago

Ever check if a bad cable was actually pinching against the case frame?

kimfisher11d ago

Yeah, and those cheapo cables can actually fry your drive controller too if they short out wrong.

price.ray11d ago

Man, you just changed my whole way of thinking about this. I used to grab the cheapest SATA cables I could find on Amazon without a second thought. Figured a cable is a cable, right? But last year I had a drive start acting flaky and swapping out the cable fixed it, so now I wonder if I was just getting lucky before. Never even considered it could mess with the controller chip, but that makes total sense when you think about the power pins and gounding. You ever run into a specific brand or type of cable that seems to cause this more?