Took me 11 hours to find a bad SATA cable, anyone else hit this wall?

Last Tuesday I was called in to fix a desktop that kept blue screening at random times. I swapped the RAM, checked the temps, ran every test I knew, and nothing showed up. After 11 hours across two days I finally swapped the plain SATA cable between the drive and motherboard, and it was perfect after that. Has anyone else spent forever chasing a software or driver issue only to find it was a $5 cable the whole time?

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jennifer8333d ago

Man, that is brutal. I mean, what gets me is how the cable probably tested fine for continuity with a multimeter but still dropped packets or whatever under load. The SATA spec has signal integrity stuff, so a bad cable can pass basic checks but mess up on long transfers or when the system is doing heavy I/O, not just at idle. Idk, maybe it's just me, but I always bend the cables slightly near the connectors now before installing. I had one where the plastic housing was pinching a wire internally, and it would only act up when the case was closed and the temps went up. Took me forever to realize the heat was changing the resistance just enough to cause errors. That $5 part cost me like three days of my life.