How common are bad SATA cables?

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Fritz

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Apr 6, 2015
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Ran into another one today. Don't know the total number I've seen but it's enough that I recognize the symptoms when I see them.

Today I was backing up my Linux box data drive, 4TB with 1.6TB of files, to another 4TB drive in a USB enclosure. kept getting a cryptic error message and after I hit cancel the source drive would drop out. Rebooting brought it back but it happened 2 more times. Pulled the drive and connected it to Windows box and ran HD Sentinel. Yup, 63 communication to the host errors and health was 100 percent. Put the drive back in the Linux box along with a different SATA cable and the copy operation is almost complete at 83 percent.

Does anybody else run into bad SATA cables on a regular basis or am I just unlucky?
 

ajs

Active Member
Mar 27, 2018
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I've ran into a number of bad cables. If you see any dma or bus errors, that is typically due to the cable.
 
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Evan

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Jan 6, 2016
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Seen from time to time but I would not say common, then again the cheapest data cables I would use are the bundled supermicro ones so maybe the really cheap ones are bad more often.
 

BeTeP

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Mar 23, 2019
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Does anybody else run into bad SATA cables on a regular basis or am I just unlucky?
From my experience it was common enough that I developed a habit of cutting any problematic cables in half immediately after identifying them as a source of the problem. Otherwise they were somehow finding their way back into my systems (mixing up with good cables, etc).

But I did not have a bad SATA cable in a few last years. Mainly because I just gradually stopped using them. Nowadays I use M.2 NVMe in desktops and SAS backplanes in servers.
 
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